Whatever we talk about DMOZ value is highly questionable. I will tell you my story. My website is not listed on yahoo dir or on dmoz. It has only got few backlinks and the total count of backlinks is 34. The site is 3 years old and its domain is registered for another 5 years. My website is listed for several keywords on page 1 of google/yahoo/msn. Surprisingly it is conveniently placed between two popular sites on search engines. How can you explain this? This is the way for the past 14 months and all i get is organic traffic. No link buying or adwords. I also didnot use keyword stuffing or whatever cheap techniques. The simple story is the website layout/design should have a style of its own. Very very relevant text on the main page and don't change the layout often. My design is unchanged for the past 2 years. Funnily, i sometimes feel that search engines got used to seeing my website and they just know everything of my website. Why change the design and confuse the google/yahoo/msn?
I'm sorry but that is yet another example of Google superstitious thinking. Spiders don't care about design or whether it changes. Spiders only care about links and whether they can follow them.
There may be many reasons. The fact that you have not changed your website design isn't one of them. The only design factor that matters is spiderable links and internal linking structure. The rest is incoming links and content.
DMOZ: * Paves the way to google directory * Paves the way to alexa directory * Give good PR oppertunity * Helps you getting listed in hundreds of many other directories * Increases your page strength. So it is quiet usuful!
Which adds very minimal benefit, if anything. Which provides even less benefit. Who has even heard of it? Not really. Look at the page you're on. Check the PR. Multiply that by .85 and divide by the total number of outgoing links, including internal navigation links, on that page. It's not passing much PR to you, is it? Which will be discounted -> duplicate content filters. See above. Not really.
I definately find DMOZ very usuful! Although I was assured that my latest directory will not be accepted there!
I guess I'm lucky, I have submitted one site and it got indexed, and it got indexed on a PR3 with only 2 other links besides mine