It's a great link to have but not necessary to rank #1. We see a lot of websites ranking in tough niches with millions of results - without the dmoz listing.
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As most others said, it is a good to have but not a must. You absolutely should not waste to much time on trying to get one as there is other venues where the same level of effort could have a much bigger return on your investment.
I was told about and read a post over on webpronews.com a while back that said Directories are becoming less important for Google. I don't know if thats totally true but Google did take the suggestion of submitting your site to directories out of their quality guidelines. What that means... who knows?
there are a lot of site out there rank better without linking to DMOZ, I think that as long as you targeted well your keywords and link to relevant site you can rank better.....I think DMOZ is not that influential unlike before.
Instead of waiting for a year or pay a tons of money for a DMOZ editor to get listed in DMOZ use the time & money to get listed in many good links directories like electronsonline.com & you will get a quite descent result. Actually if you use the waiting period for DMOZ or half the money you would spend for immediate inclusion you can get a better result from using that time & money for normal directories submissions .