Hi Mr Whipster,
IMO there has been a radical shift in defining what
pages are.
From what I am seeing the quality of pages depends much more on incoming links.
I have also witnessed new pages going directly supplemental for a number of days (weeks) and then surface and rank well.
What I am yet to see are supplemental results drive traffic. When pages go supplemental the impact on incoming traffic is visible.
I believe this issue is of greater importance and requires a great deal of effort for multilingual sites.
Pages with good incoming links from different locations should help solve the supplemental issues that you mentioned - any experience along these lines out there ??