I totally agree with your thought here, Matt. It's all about the amount of quality backlinks that permanently linked to our site, but not the relevant or not relevant sites...
Exactly, people seem to have trouble seeing a difference between PR and rankings - what may help PR doesn't always help rankings. This is where most of the problems lie. Generally speaking......... 0 PR unrelated links = Doesn't help rankings or PR High PR unrelated links = Increases PR, less impact on rankings High PR related links = Helps PR and rankings Topic, content and relevance have no impact on PR - it does impact on rankings though.
I dont agree if u stop building links that doesn't means that your PR will drop. PR solely depends upon the quality of links you are getting, if the quality of those incoming links drop then your will also drop. So try on building some good quality links which u think would remain for some longer.