All depends... there are two school of thoughts on the demise of the directories. One argued that Google is just bashing all directories and site that sell links over the head.
Another school of though said that the leading directories were reported to Google for selling link and were penalised manually, and not via algo change.
If the second thoughts are the right one then I think there is not home of them coming back, however, if the first is the correct version of events, then they may well come back and rank highly again.
But I have seen this pattern a few times.... a directory becomes incredibly popular (eg. bluefind.com , hotvnothot etc), words gets to Google, Google basked directory over the head and directory goes downhill

Didin't think of the latter in reporting. That's nasty but I guess there's alot of jealousy out there.

Still, even with all the talk about Google getting reports on directories selling links - surely this is nonsense on their behalf to act this way. Don't see them doing this to the Yahoo directory now.

Yaoo is much too big to be bullied by Goolge.. even Google recommends Yahoo directory. They can only bully little people like us