The problem with white hat for affiliates is that you're competing against the people that get a bigger cut of the pie because they're higher up the chain.
The white hat winners have big budgets, and aren't just investing in SEO because it's all they know, but as part of a combined strategy across paid, social, email, etc. That almost immediately eliminates most of the "spam" markers that pure SEO's tend to get labeled with, meaning that penalties aren't really a concern for real businesses with real online marketing strategies.
If you want white hat success, you need to be building a real business behind it. Sell a product, service, or whatever. If you're just another affiliate, you're most likely going to struggle. You have no value add to the customer, what-so-ever, no matter how long you've spent trying to fool yourself that you do. Your content costs $0.02-$0.05 a word from oDesk just like everyone else's, and is rewritten from the first 5 pages of search results for "best weight loss supplement", "best online casino", "payday loans online", "raspberry ketones review" or whatever other industry you're in. That "high quality content" may be written by a super human English college grad who makes one grammatical error per million words, but it's not high quality. It's the same bullshit on every affiliate site.
The whitehat affiliates that do thrive are the affiliates with clever software or in depth industry experience that add value to the buying process. Think Skyscanner, Compare The Market, Kayak, Poker Affiliate Listings, etc..
Affiliates need to realise that their industry is being cannibalised, whether they're in PPC, SEO, Social or whatever. As the industry matures, and the companies themselves become better at marketing themselves cross channel online, they're going to progressively price affiliates out of the game. There will remain a place for the people that can do the blackhat stuff that real brands don't want to be associated with (no matter what channel it may be), and the gurus who have built up cult followings, but the whole PPC direct to a standard lander, or SEO to do much the same, Pinterest spam, yada yada... I have my doubts.