I feel that is vice versa, the goal has always been IPFS. However I thought it would be quickly apparent that with no incentive structure to do the actual hosting to a significant scale, it is a dead in the water project. The idea is great however it comes with multiple pain-points that exist at the same time, and honestly jumping in the ICO craze at the point that they did was a smart business decision because imo something like Filecoin is absolutely necessary.
I mean for success you need to achieve ample storage capacity, strong financial incentives that strengthen the network, and scaling. Major issues here being that following the ICO they need to release something that matches what investors wanted to some degree (more focus on Filecoin) and that a lot of scaling/tooling needs to come from outside Protocol Labs. They are heavily relying on Ethereum to successfully scale in a way that is friendly to the Filecoin protocol and that is an issue that has been dragging out for at least the last two years on how to do it properly.
I mean for success you need to achieve ample storage capacity, strong financial incentives that strengthen the network, and scaling. Major issues here being that following the ICO they need to release something that matches what investors wanted to some degree (more focus on Filecoin) and that a lot of scaling/tooling needs to come from outside Protocol Labs. They are heavily relying on Ethereum to successfully scale in a way that is friendly to the Filecoin protocol and that is an issue that has been dragging out for at least the last two years on how to do it properly.