Being a seller PR is still important, people prefer to buy posts from sites which has PR
I just see one seller giving PR6 homepage links on BHW, they may be expired/dropped domains, he has good sales because he has PR.
Further, If I have to buy posts etc, I will prefer blogs with Good DA and PR etc
Google is crazy, I remember matt cutts tweet when I said, there will be no update in 2013 and in last month pagerank update comes up. which shows they have some kind of internal communication gapes.
we will still count PR as important metric until Google officially announced its retirement.