As a German I can assure you that both "a" in Ratte and Rathaus sound the same. The "a" in Rathaus is just spoken a bit longer and the following "t" is hardly pronounced, whereas the "a" in Ratte is spoken very short and the "t" is pronounced strongly. I hope that helps.
Google didn't feel the need to notify affected developers. On an SEO blog [1] a Google spokesman says that developers should re-apply and wait 5-6 weeks.
I think you're already on the right way with classical music, long walks, reading books, etc. (except for the Internet addiction). I guess if you keep on doing things you like you will recover. All the best to you.
According to Yahoo, the Yahoo Site Explorer runs only until 2012 because of the Yahoo-Microsoft search deal ( http://www.ysearchblog.com/2010/08/17/search-alliance-update... ). Open Site Explorer is the free promotion site of the commercial toolset Linkscape, so it's similar to us. Google link queries are very incomplete, that's why webmasters use other databases. In addition, we provide other tools as well.
SEOprofiler shows the backlinks only for the creativecommons.org subdomain, excluding support.creativecommons.org, wiki.creativecommons.org, search.creativecommons.org, de.creativecommons.org, etc. For this reason, the backlink number appears to be lower.