John, wake up and smell the coffee. There
is a correlation with
PR and Webmasters paying to submit. Many Webmasters will pay to submit to a
new directory as they
percieve their category will obtain
PR at a later stage. They do this in
hope they will be the only one, or only one of a few, in the category.
If a paid directory
loses all
PR they will NOT be making $$ for very long off paid submissions.
Your own directory home page has a Toolbar
PR of 8, you obviously paid/worked to get that for a
reason. It cannot be for rankings as you have stated before Google rankings for your directory pages are not important.
This is one of the main reasons why DMOZ is spammed by so many. They believe it is a silver bullet for their Google ranking. This myth continues to perpetuate on forums. Not many submit to DMOZ for direct traffic as, even with its thousands of downstream users, the traffic is next to nothing.