An up-to-date, well-maintained niche directory will often attract good targetted traffic, and webmasters within that niche will be pleased to link to it if the quality is good.
While backlinks are important directories will exist and be in demand. Good directories will always be important. Further, the directories that have been created because "it is cool to have a directory man" will gradually fade into the abyss. Absolutely agree, the default scheme is functional but ugly. It also does not say to a potential client, hey I am committed to this site and will endeavour to make it more valuable.
with net being crowded with lots n lots of directories, its may be easier for link builders to build up links for free but still i feel for Dir submission there are still about top 100 dir that counts the most. un-necessary link farming to thousands of dir is not going to yeild you the quality. you are just spamming. better to opt for quality than quantity.
not neccesary man, some of the small ones can become really big, and hard to get in, so if you're the first one there it's best for you.
Over the past week I have started up two directories and have had about 30 sites submitted each day, Getting into the directory market is good if you can get user to submit sites and get traffic to the directory.
what i have experienced is people who want to submit for free are 10 times than people who are willing to pay. Many people talk about quality, but excuse me what exactly you mean by quality? what you expect from a directory in terms of quality. say, if i have high traffic directory charging for inclusions $49, does that mean that if spam site is guaranteed to get included just because the owner can pay $49. Then directory can never be kept of high quality. That is why i wonder that dmoz is always free.
Deppends on how you go on to categorize them. Talking about the big one's means those with a heavy traffic and high pr>=5. Link from those really counts a log.doesn't matter even if they provide you with a link on the inner page if the amount of traffic is high its really worth going for it!!! I am not saying that you are wrong in by any means but getting a link in a high traffic dir = getting 50 odd in low or medium traffic one.