Good post. We've been using IPFS for a few months already and have had decent success with it, even outside of using a tool like Shift. I think IPFS is a good long-term bet for offchain storage and for a number of the use cases you don't really need any add on platform (like Filecoin); better to understand and integrate IPFS as the core product.

Architecturally, you need to be careful about coupling IPFS with DApps. DApps is proprietary to Ethereum. IPFS can work with any blockchain network. Building simple UIs, or even better m2m code, to interact with IPFS (or other offchain tools like Storj) is not particularly challenging, and I think is a better fit for the more mundane use cases than taking on the overheard a product like Filecoin.