Hi Peter,
The conclusion I have come to is to try to keep page links to around 100 but that said there is a lot of conflicting info out there which is where the confusion comes in. I have read that 100-200 is ok now a days but essentially the more links you have the more the page authority will be diluted so it makes sense to keep links down.
On this topic Moz’s on page grader tool says
“Google has confirmed that the use of too many internal links on a page will not trigger a penalty, but it can influence the quantity of link juice sent through those links and dilute your page's ability to have search engines crawl, index, and rank link targets.
Recommendation: Scale down the number of internal links on your page to fewer than 100, if possible. At a minimum, try to keep navigation and menu links to fewer than 100. See http://moz.com/blog/how-many-links-is-too-many.”
In my situation there are some unnecessary and duplicated links so I looking at ways in which these can be reduced. My hope is that the page authority will then be channeled to the more important areas of the site.
Regarding location of the links, those in the navigation will probably carry more weight than those in the footer so I would try to include your most important links in the top part of the page. If you look at Moz’s home page for example the footer links are pointing to pages like Contact us, research tools, parents, api and Terms rather than duplicating the main navigation again.
That is my take on the situation anyway.
Hope this helps,
Andy