Your points are spot on and things we've been thinking a lot about. I also wouldn't feel comfortable putting a Dat link in a paper yet, but that is an eventual goal because of the persistence properties of dat compared to http urls.
> Maybe Dat plus Zenodo could do the trick eventually.
Yes, exactly!! Dat supports http publishing right now, so you can run `dat sync --http` on a server and it'll live publish files from the source to an http site.
We are working on also supporting http downloads. The idea is you publish to Zenodo, including the SLEEP metadata, dat can then clone the files over http (including content verification) or via the peer network, i.e. `dat clone zenodo.org/record/439922`.
We are super excited for the http downloading because it'll allow dat to store files on any data repository with a good api and a http file backend. We've been talking with the Dataverse folks on how to accomplish this there and have an eye on others such as Zenodo.