Is Domain Rating worth chasing?
Raising DR looks achievable and measurable, which makes it very tempting to treat as the goal.
It is trivially gameable at the low end, which should tell you something
Eighty-five directory listings took this project from 0 to the low twenties over a weekend. If a metric can be moved that far, that fast, by work that produces no readers, it is not measuring what you want it to measure.
What the listings were actually worth
Not nothing. They establish the site as a named entity, which helps a brand query resolve to you rather than to something similar. That is a real benefit and it is not the benefit the score implies.
The failure mode
A satisfying number, a weekend spent, and no movement on any query you care about. If that describes your last link sprint, the metric chose your work for you.
Chase the links, the number follows
DR is an output. Every action that raises it honestly is an action worth taking anyway, and every action that raises it dishonestly is one you would not take if the number did not exist. That asymmetry is the entire answer: if you would not do it without the score, the score is the wrong reason to do it.
When DR does matter
As a diagnostic when you cannot rank and cannot see why. At 22, this site could compete on specific queries and could not compete on broad ones, and the gap between those two experiences is largely authority. Reading DR as a description of which shelf you can currently reach is fair. Reading it as a target to hit by Q3 is not.
Measured, not asserted
DR 22, 122 linking sites, and an average position of 9.07. The traffic that reached 100,542 users came from breadth of queries at middling positions, not from authority.
Free tool for this: Position Value Calculator. No account, nothing uploaded.
Where this goes deeper
Every number on this page comes from one complete dataset: one product taken from zero to 100K+ users on search alone, with nothing spent on advertising. The full argument is Chapter 25 of the book. Five chapters are free to read.