Having Linq and its flavors, one doesn't need to learn datasets at all

If a person only ever does new development, and never latches onto an existing project, that might be fine - but the truth is that a large # of developers get involved with existing projects where datasets are used - so I wouldn't

You seem to like LINQ very much, and that's fine - but a vast # of developers weren't impressed enough to abandon existing techniques (either stored procs or in-line queries that populated datasets or collections).