IPFS's design makes it so that it's all of those things, or none of them. Picking one of them doesn't fit the shape of the technology. IPFS is basically the answer to the question "what is the RIGHT way to decentralize the web?". If you think about that question hard enough, then anyone can see that their way of doing it is the "right" way. It's just obvious. The problem is that all of these mutually supporting components need to be bootstrapped in order to make it work. You can't take the storage of content and federate it out across the entire internet without being able to refer to it by a content id. You can't just have content addressing by itself, because then it's inconvenient to find things on a day-to-day basis. So that means you need a DNS equivalent. And you can't assume a decentralized graph of network participants will bother to serve this information unless there's reward in it for them. So you come to filecoin. Etc.

Point being, they didn't just bite these pieces off randomly: they see a picture of how the internet _could_ work, and they're trying to realize it. If they can get it working, then boom! You have decentralized internet, and you also have a ton of bonuses that just fall out from this being the right way to do things: resistance to censorship, better archiving, reduced influence of web megacorps, etc. But you have to have it -all- to actually be better. The sum is WAY greater than the parts.

The trouble is, this statement:

> Right now it does none of those things well.

is true.

So I get what you're saying. To build user-adoption, they need to find a way to deliver an improved experience, not just an improved model that would be better if more people used it. But I object to the idea that the solution is to choose one of those things at the exclusion of the others. The whole idea doesn't make sense if they choose one. If I were advising them, I wouldn't tell them to reduce their scope in terms of "doing all the things", but rather reduce their scope in terms of doing all the things for the entire internet. They should find some kind of sub-network or community that gets extra value out of the decentralization, and prove out the concept there. Maybe it's a big company's intranet, or a network of (paging ARPA) universities?