As a page owner you want your site to be on a page with other sites like yours, so directory submissions are useful. With automatic submissions they often put your site in the wrong category on a new directory with no
PR.
These directories should give you a backlink, and backlinks are important.
As a directory owner I can say it is a waste of my time. All these people from India submit to the wrong categories constantly
So I end up either editing their work all day, or i will not approve the link that they submitted.
Basically, submit to high
PR directories that manually approve their links. Try to manually submit when possible. Do not load your description up with keywords either. PM me for a free link to my directory if you want