IPFS has perhaps 2,000 times the resources ($) of dat. (Raised via the filecoin sale.) Surely that must count for a little.
Instead of just reusing bittorrents piece-per-peer-exchange-protocol (that greedy not perfect algorithm, forgot its name) - which can saturate even high end links, they invented bitswap, full with bugs, then decided lets make filecoin instead, like a bartering engine of exchanging pieces.
datproject also can saturate my 250mbit connection.
(Theoretically you can do this with IPFS too, but I love how dat is implemented!)
I've also been excited that Dat seems to be investing a Rust implementation that would presumably make Dat accessible from any language that can interoperate with C/Rust.