DMOZ is the Taj Mahal of website directories. Good luck getting into it, getting listed into it will work wonders for increasing your pagerank.
Really? My site was a PR 3 before it was listed, and was a PR 3 after it was listed. There was another thread a while back which showed a list of several sites listed with a PR of 0. So ya may really wanna rethink that. Though, it's good to know ya read those SEO blogs that get all their information from other SEO blogs (that date back years & years). Its no more or less important then any other directory....and the importance of directories has gone down hill in the last couple of years, so take that as it's worth.
Not being listed on DMOZ isn't the end of the world, however, I have seen a slight jump in rankings for a few of my sites once their DMOZ submission was approved and Google had indexed and updated.
Yes, not being listed in dmoz is not the end of the world. None of my sites are listed on dmoz. Never I bothered too. But I am happy with my PR and rankings for my keywords, without dmoz listing.