Hi Joseph
In the urban jungle many of us live in, a PVC bow seems indeed a “primitive” attribute: you made it yourself with very simple tools, PVC pipes were never intended for this purpose (making it more exciting) and still it shoots as well as many regular bows.
If someone's goal is to have a decent bow as fast and cheap as possible, PVC is the deal. I made my fair share of PVC bows, out of curiosity and learned a lot about bow physics, but found it just too easy. It doesn’t take a lot of skill to make about any possible type of bow from PVC (except for a regular longbow or a yumi). Making about every design type of bow from natural materials (wood, horn, sinew, plant fibers, hide glue, …) will require extreme dedication and craftmanship, not to mention close to a lifetime of bow making efforts. That’s why I (and I guess many others here) value primitive archery so much more.
For the rest: it looks like a PVC-wood composite bow (very short PVC working section, very long extremely light wooden recurves) can reach 200 fps@10 gpp (Nicholas Tomihama claims to have made one some time ago). That's quite an achievement by itself, but it doesn't relate to skill, only to knowledge.
There's a pretty large google community (>1000 members) on PVC archery, plenty of PVC addicts there. Different audience here.