More than likely your seperator went out and that is when you start pushing oil past your seals and out of your dipstick. That exact thing happened to me; I have a 2001 3.0i as well.

Valve cover gasket is just a symptom. Having said that, I replaced the entire seperator system (seperator itself, hoses, distribution piece) and my ICV (spurious), swapped the valve cover gasket (I can do that in 45 mins or so now) and had no more issues.

This system was designed to fail, and by that I mean eventually oil and blowby will overwhelm the sperator and it needs to be replaced. The other alternative is to have the PCV system cast into the manifold or some such, and the system will constantly innundate one or two cylinders only with blowby, and those cylinders will lean out and others will not. There is a compromise there.

But, unless you are having some awful other problems with the car, there is no reason to huck the entire thing because of the seperator system. It's $300 in parts and a couple hours of labor, and you should be able to get another 70k or so from the new parts, perhaps more.

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2001 E53 3.0 5pd