Pleasurepays

the "sandbox" idea is not something automatically applied to a new domain. its a filter to affect new domains, with suspicious linking patterns targeting VERY specific and competitive sets of keyword phrases which are most often the target of spammers.

ANYONE can register a new domain, put content on it, link to it, set up the internal linking correctly, get it indexed and start ranking for various phrases in minutes or hours.

all you have described to me is the possible idea that you put up an "aged domain" that went after VERY weak phrases with little to no competition... where inbound links, PR and all the usual factors play a lessor role since there are no other relevant results to show.

you absolutely cannot show me a site that you put up to go after a phrase that gets say 1000 searches a day where you are ranking higher in Google than well established sites, with backlinks and PR that are targeting that phrase with a "domain", no history of a website on that domain, that has no backlinks and make the argument that is true simply because of the "age of the domain".

you are essentially saying that you can walk right around something like PageRank which is the very core of the search engine to determine importance of pages and on which all subsequent factors are based on to determine query results. That's a very odd claim to make ;)

AND you seem to be confused about "backlinks" and are not taking into account the sites own internal linking structure as a factor. PR is about pages linking to pages... not domains linking to domains or solely external sites linking to your site. If you removed all inbound links to wikipedia, they would still have an absurd PR value and traffic because of their internal linking structure and the fact that they are closing in on 1/2 a BILLION pages - each starting with an initial PR value of 1 and passing that on to other pages and the index page.