The open conjecture (officially, the existence of subexponentially strong pseudorandom function families), is a weaker variant of some stronger conjectures (the

The open conjecture (officially, the existence of subexponentially strong pseudorandom function families), is a weaker variant of some stronger conjectures (the existence of polynomially-strong pseudorandom number generators) which actually imply P != NP. So in some sense the problems are very close to equivalent. But yes I think you're right, that nobody would take such an approach seriously.