I realize that services that do the work for you are frowned upon, although I am not sure how SE can tell.
SEs somehow determine "what your site is about" and "what their site is about", and if they're too different, the SE doesn't like it. The idea is not to prevent someone from running a match-making service for sites, but to stop "link farms" and such
gaming of the system, trying to artificially inflate your incoming link count when in fact most of those links will never be used.
I was more interested in finding a place where sites who want to exchange links can advertise that fact. I have manually submitted inquiries to 12 sites, only 2 wrote back. So I know this process is going to be tedious, I was just hoping there might be some more organized, efficient way to get two parties together. Any ideas?
No, but it sounds like a good idea for a successful business! You sell your services as a match-maker to bring together like-minded (but not necessarily directly competing) sites who would like to exchange links, that Google et al. would be happy to count. The trick would be to mostly automate the system, to minimize people time needed to make the decision.