I agree with Ed.  SEO is more of an art than a science for sure.
There will always be disagreements because there are multiple search engine crawlers and indexers with their own secret, complex, and constantly changing algorithms.

FWIW, here's my subjective opinion on the specific topic:

Keywords in anchor names are not going to weigh in nearly as heavy as good keywords in the descriptive text and title attribute of an inbound link.  
It doesn't hurt to always keep keywords in mind when building these, but a higher priority should be placed on where the name is attached. 
In other words, it should be attached to a good keyword loaded H1, H2, or H3 enclosed title to get maximum benefit as was pointed out.

Well - I'm not a programmer and built my site entirely in MS FP since year 2000. The last years I used a FP add-in that helpt me update some head-keys. I have since my start parked in the top leed searching for Whiplash in Google.

A normal user doesn't care about whats going on in a software or program background - however they care about the result.

 Regards / Tomas