The links re "joke" don’t substantiate notion of pagerank as a joke; more like ya-boo-sucks to google after various blog sites lost pagerank last October.
Saying pagerank is a joke akin to saying Google is a joke, as PR at core of Google success.
Pagerank does, however, need to be taken with pinch ol salt, esp the PR that we can see. Can have lower PR pages that do well in SERPs, say.
But if utterly a joke, we’d see PR all over the place; and if anyone reading wants to still say it’s a joke, I’ll happily trade links from high PR pages of yours, linking back from a minor page of mine which I link to internally using nofollow, noindex tags.