Hi Cricket. I am so excited to see such a quick response to my post. I am new to this forum (though not to other webmaster forums :p ) but nowhere I saw such a fast response from admin board
. Its really really appreciated. Dont know if I am allowed to send a rep but I will certainly make an attempt to give one to the admin
Now coming down to topic, yes certainly we just can't ignore pagerank but I believe the focus should be on optimization which would lead to higher SERP. There are sites who do so well but have low PR and there could be sites (i am not too sure) which would have decent page rank but would be doing not so good.
But yes no doubt that a site with very high PR would certainly be doing great