I think that part of the problem about this was caused by the many
start-up SEOs who started cold-calling business owners a couple of
years back and filling their ears with a load of drivvel about PR and
how their sites would die without it.
Back in 2005, before I moved to Cyprus, I lost track of the number of
cold-calling SEO salesmen I had to dismantle on a weekly basis, all of
whom were singing the same tune about PR and making the same idiotic
promises about 'the power of sitemaps, portal pages, link farms,
pyramids and the predictions of 'king Nostradamus'.

And sure as sh*t, those business owners would talk to their business
owner buddies over a beer on Friday night and pass what they'd heard
from these Yahoo [the Ignoranus*, not the search engine] salesmen,
thus propagating the whole game of PR chinese whispers.

*Ignoranus = Someone who is not only stupid, but also an a$$hole

Add this general user confusion to the fact that every SEO crackpot
out there has their own idea about PR and the little green bar, and
you wind up with an SEO soup so thick, you could trot a donkey across
it...
So I'd say that a great many people out there today will actually
trust in the green without first evaluating the level of information
on any given site.

Ah, what the hell... 'Death to the Green-Bar-of-Madness', it's caused
enough havoc for one century.

Sorry... I'll take my pills now...

Sasch