I thought I'd discuss the importance of DA and PA. After looking around these forums I've noticed a lot of people put emphasis on PR still even though that's a very minor factor for ranking a website. A simple competition analysis of any industry has come back with the same results. A site linking to yours with a moderately high PA (30+) and a moderately high DA (20+) will generally be indexed by Google webmaster tools within a day or two. DA and PA are the base for my link building techniques. After that I look at other metrics and if I like what I see I attempt to get the link. DA and PA are NOT the only thing that determines if I move forward. Trust - Trust flow metrics are analyzed by MOZ and by Majestic SEO and I live by the trust analysis of a site. I challenge anyone here to show me a site ranked on the first page of Google in a high competition industry that doesn't have a score of 20-30+ trust flow on Majestic SEO. Typically the higher the trust the better indexed a site will be. These metrics all flow together. A site with low trust flow won't have a high DA or PA generally. What I tend to look for is a high PA and a trust flow ranked even higher than that PA. Either way if you have the two and they are moderately decent then every tool including Google webmaster tools will index that link almost instantly. These are just a few thoughts and I would like to hear everyone else's opinion on the matter. I haven't played around with MOZ trust too much either so if anyone would like to give me information regarding a good MOZ trust flow I would appreciate it.
I think your post is spot on and very relevant today as Google has not updated pagerank for some time (february 2013, I think). I use PA/DA a lot and I do use Moztrust as an indicator. You can get API Keys for free at http://moz.com/products/api/keys and there are some good free spreadsheets that you can run a tool http://moz.com/blog/excel-and-google-docs-tools-for-the-ultimate-seo-dashboard to do serp analysis...
I second your opinion but PR is still main and big factor when it comes of analyse the outstanding value of domain name or website. Page authority and domain authority are important factors. But I have observed many loop holes in these attributes in real sense. I have many sites which got higher PA and DA over the times while having no such value regarding content etc. On the other hand some other sites got no such valued PA DA as it should be. Google will hold and sustain the value of PR as a brand. Cheers !