Haha, I've been pondering on this subject all day actually and have formed a hypothesis regarding the importance of dragon. In high elo gameplay where every cs is important, position and timing are absolutely crucial in team fights, when losing a crucial member during a team fight can almost guarantee an imminent 5v4 bulldozer taking your base in seconds, yes I think dragon buffs may play a significant role in achieving victory.
With that being said, the ridiculous lengths people will go to in low elo matches for a single dragon is laughable. Remember what you did before you realized rotating lanes for different objectives was an option? Or that it's generally a bad idea to ignore huge waves of minions marching towards undefended turrets so you could chase nidalee through the jungle for 15 minutes only to have the shutdown gold end up in thresh's pocket (Not bashing kill secures btw haha), or how about when you yelled at the adc for focusing the safest viable target rather than the diving the enemy adc? In short, don't contest dragon if you don't have the numbers, don't contest dragon if you don't have the levels/items you need to win a team fight, and most importantly, don't spend 10 minutes dancing in the river because both teams are afraid to engage.
The way I look at it, league is an objective based game with 1 objective, destroy the enemy nexus. Can dragon help you achieve this goal? Yes, to the extent that it does not detract from the many other things you could have been doing during that time. When you see nightblue or someone jungling on twitch and he spots the enemy jungler ganking top lane, what does he do? He capitalizes on the information by securing dragon or ganking bot without fear of being counter ganked or steals enemy jungle camps. The reason I wrote up this long post is because yes I am low elo, and I am sick and fucking tired of people bitching about my absence in team fights. Now, let me say this, I am not opposed to team fighting when it is either necessary or beneficial to winning, in essence, when my presence and contribution will be of note, and when there isn't something better I could be doing with me time. It's the same mentality you have to take when you're jungling. Where is my time best spent? If you've got 4 people defending against a five man push on one of our turrets and I can take two turrets an inhib and secure lane pressure in multiple lanes and take about 50 or 60 CS in the process and maybe grab a dragon solo, stfu and defend that turret yourself or trade it for the massive loss the enemy has sustained while I just made 1500 gold to finish my next item.
It's not greed, it's bishop takes queen and puts king in check. The easiest way to defend your own turrets is to take something more important to them, and right now ladies and gents, dragon seems to be the holy grail of wasted effort in low elo due to poor team fighting just from lack of experience (I'm guilty of this myself) and poor group synergy. I'm sorry, but I'm not betting on a group of strangers that are considered to be the ones taking the shortbus to the rift that grouping up with you for a 5v5 is necessarily the best way to win the game. If I see an opp to take a turret or an inhib and the other option is to do the safety dance with my retarded classmates, if I'm strong enough I'm going to do the former. 9/10 what happens in this scenario? They back one by one to stop me from getting my 2nd turret or inhib only to walk face first into more than they bargained for and get to spend the next 60 seconds QQing that one of their team mates is shit for feeding X champ who is OP and takes no skill (but weren't bright enough to pick for some reason >_>) . Hey, ya know what though, this isn't a great strat, and prolly is dealt with much more swiftly by more skilled players that know when to farm, when to fight, and when to run, but ever since the onset of the "Tank meta", if I'm playing with and against people that are having fun chasing through the jungle to kill a low HP sion or standing around twiddling their thumbs because tanks at this elo are more often than not total shit at peeling for their squishies, I'm gonna try and win the game by myself by staying the fuck away from enemy groups, pushing lanes and looking for easy picks and farm for that inglorious solo carry rather than praying to the lords of league that I'll last long enough in a team fight with a group of people that learned to play league with face applied directly to keyboard while having two 4k hp tanks run a train on my ass prison style.
This one goes out to all the ADC's like me, who have never harshed on anyone, for anything, during any game... ever. We have never won a game and said "ez". We have never blamed a lane for feeding. We have never antagonized our enemies who were kind enough to take time out of their day to play a game with you. On behalf of the good guy adc, thank you jungler for ganking whenever you could, and it's ok that sometimes you totally bone us by giving the enemy laner 3 kills while we were buying items, we know you didn't mean to. We forgive you mid laner for forgetting to ping MIA, we should be watching the minimap too and take full responsibility for our own demise at the hands of your 7/0 assassin opponent that's 4 levels higher than us. It's ok, and we were happy to play with you none the less.
/Drops mic
... not sure what my where I was going with this anyways o_0 Talk about your bipolar tangential thought process.
or 
and their lane opponent doesn't. The stats that dragons 1-4 aren't really noticeable except in close matchs or in specific scenarios. Certain buffs are more important depending on team comps, such as having the 3rd dragon buff, the MS buff, lets a team that pokes run away easier or allows the chasing team to catch up. The 4th buff is important more because it allows the 5th buff, so it can force the enemy to fight. The 3rd one can as well, depending on how well one teams late game is compared to the other.
so yo u do the math what is more worth? 150g or 5% MS?
