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Particularly, the updates that have been made in the last few months with the new interface. Any suggestions? Book and course are of interest.

You are comparing apples and oranges. The combination of PR and pa isn't really going to help you as much as some other Moz metrics. If you are spending time and effort getting links as opposed to mass spam stuff you will want to focus on the subdomain mozrank of the potential link your are getting. Especially if it is a blog related link. That is because your page will grow in authority over time as google indexes more pages on that website that contain links back to that specific post. Great links grow in value over time and crappy links dont. Domain authority is valuable, but it can misrepresent the value of a link if the following occurs:

The website uses spammy methods to link build (Linkscape doesn't do a very good job of determining the difference between contextual based links and comment spam.

The link you are getting is on a subdomain of the website (DA takes into account the domain mozrank which is different than the subdomain which is more important. Especially on hosted blogs like wordpress, blogger, or typepad)

I have asked Ran, and tend to agree with him that you are much better focusing on links on high authority subdomain mozranks with low PA than low domain authorities with a high PA.

That being said. Make sure you also take into account the amount of links on the page. Whatever authority you are going to grab is going to be split amongst those links. It may also be beneficial to spend a proportional amount of time evaluating to the value of the links. If you have a choice between two websites that are in the 70's of DA range you should be spending a lot more time evaluating than DA's in the 20's and 30's

Care to elaborate on why?

Which would you chose? Link on PA56  with 88 OBL's and 80  IBL's or a link on a PA75 with 225 OBL's &  40 IBL (Same Domain)

Pretty self explanatory. I want to know what metrics SEOMozzers rely on most. If you are not an expert at evaluating links for large scale development please don't muddy the waters on this question with a thin and vague answer.

Awesome post. To throw one step further. I would like to propose the other site of your dark coin. Links that appear to exist but really have no value. This is common in the tactics of spammers picking up dropped domains and pitching them as high PR sites for link building. They have the signals of a strong domain, but futher evaluation proves that it takes more than strong moz rank to actually provide value to a site. I would assume the SEOmoz guys would say that the value is built in to their equation but you also have to remember that SEOmoz's linkscape only indexes a fraction of the web thats out their. It performs better in some niches than other. I find it useful to benchmark against a secondary source. I commonly check a domains metrics against SEOmoz and Majestic. Both have their own strengths. If I am link buying, I stay away from any site that doesn't perform well in both metrics as you will find that most sites with decent rankings do.

This will save you from dealing with "made for link sales based on PR rank" type sites that have little real world value.