Relevance of Page Rank in monetization of your site

Though how exactly a high or low page rank affects your site’s ranking in search results, improving page rank has become an industry in itself. While searching for a term in Google, even in first page of its results, you would see a page with lower PR ranking higher in results vs a page with higher page rank.

As such Google won’t share its secrets about it and not even how often it would update it is made public apart from knowledge that a patented PageRank algorithm is the heart of their web ranking system. What could be the strength of this algorithm when you see many “Pages under Construction” having PR5? Google says it uses numerous factors (“over 500 million variables and 2 billion terms") including PageRank to examine the whole web and find the most relevant and important pages to match a specific search.
May be, all other things being equal, it ranks the page with higher page rank higher in the results vs the other; but practically “all other things” are never equal. So why worship of this tool bar. For among few things that this page rank does help are site fetches higher price; its links sell at higher premium and for paid blogging you get a premium offer.
That is while its role in ranking of your site in results is not clear, it does help you monetize your site better albeit indirectly from “Non Google Sources”. So, love it or hate it, you can not afford to ignore it. Such is enigma of this page rank that assuming Google suddenly withdraws this; lots of portals or businesses that exist to manipulate the page rank by selling links or other such methods, would come to grinding halt.
I believe, more than PR, you need to bother about site architecture and good content. Anyways, in your quest to improve your PR, you must learn to hold yourself and not link to link farms or some thing like that else your site may be punished. Google has some filters in place to discourage the webmasters who try to abuse and manipulate PageRank.
With Google accounting for more than 76% of the online searches made you can not afford to not to optimize your site for Google and whether or not PR helps in search result ranking, you need to do everything you can to increase the PR of the pages.
There may not be any need to become obsessed with it and fall prey to shady SEO techniques and link farming. Despite all the mystery surrounding PR system, one thing that surely works to get better PR is good site navigation, unique and meaningful content and of course good readership.