Keep in mind this was an academic project. The project ran its course, produced many dissertations, and more importantly successful researchers and engineers, and inspired many others to look at FPGAs and dataflow. It wasn't ever meant to be about a product or building a company...

I would counter that the project was immensely successful with the stated academic goals: as proof, the Microsoft Azure AI HW division (formerly people responsible for project catapult) was almost entirely bootstrapped by many of the same people who worked on the TRIPS project.

Here's Doug Burger providing a small retrospective on the project: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/podcast/clouds-cata...