They may not "remove" PR, however with updates like Hummingbird I think PR is as vestigial as wisdom teeth. Again lately I see pages with low or no "PR" outranking pages with high "PR".
like in early 2010 and 2011 google dont give much weight on PR ..... there are 100's of factors now....
true happening with me .... I have 2 months old site with no backlinks no page rank is ranking over many old sites... mine content is free..unique quality.....sending social signals to site and only doing on page seo....no blackhat activity like backlinking.....
DA and PA are whorst indicator for quality of sites. There are tons of method how to increase this indicators with just black seo actions. (very easy & dirty actions)
because they are coming through feeds, to give my opinion about being tired of seeing them and how worthless they are... Does that answer your brilliant question...?
I actually think this is a good thing, there are far more methods of comparing a site's value than it's pagerank. There are several spammy PR5+ sites out there.
I am just incredibly surprised that a lot of webmasters and SEOs still aren't getting the big hints Google is giving with regards to PR. What you see on the toolbar is wildly inaccurate (why? because of Internal PR), even after it has just been published it can't be taken too seriously (when was the PR snapshot taken?, for example). If PR has any relevancy whatsoever then it is Internal PR, which is continuously recalculated. It's one small part of how Google determines to rank a site. Clearly Panda, Penguin and not updating PR in a long-time are not enough of a message for some people. Hummingbird should be a gigantic signal about what is important. Sadly, this is lost on some people and these are the ones who are going to be left behind chasing a pointless number.
More and more, people use google to find specific information not covered on regular sites they visit. Otherwise they go directly to sites like Facebook, Amazon and YouTube to find what they are looking for. Search beyond google is getting very mature, and that has made it easier for google to get away with more ads in their search results. I think in the long run this may dilute their brand, but they are already so dominant they really don't need to worry too much. Link building is going out of style too.
Only people that care about it are the ones that rely on it to make their money. It has been worthless for years. But some people have no skills (or like many here, lack the intelligence to understand it's worthless) and can't make money any other way so they have to rely on it
Personally I like it for a general indication on how my site is doing, your remark on a lack of intelligence is quiet offending given I started the thread.