I wonder if it opens up new opportunities erasure coding replacements, e.g. RAID for disks, PARQ2 for data recovery, or as Reed-Solomon replacements for comms?
These sorts of codes are not really the thing you want for RAID-N. They work best with coding groups of thousands of packets or more.
For adding redundant blocks to a read-mostly/only file (e.g. to correct for sector errors) they could be useful indeed. as that's a case where you might have a few dozen correction packets protecting millions. I'd really like to see some FS develop support for file protection because on SSDs I'm seeing a LOT more random sector failures that disk failures.
RS codes are optimal for erasures so you really only want to use something else where there are so many packets in the group that RS code performance would be poor... or where a rateless code would be useful.
For comms it's better since raptorq can generate a large number of symbols. One use would be a TCP replacement. If a file can be transmitted in 100 TCP packets, and there's 10% loss on the link, then the client needs to retry the lost packets in order.
With raptorq, the client needs to receive 102 packets (I believe). And this can be any combination of original 100 packets and the large number of potential recovery packets.
I wonder if it opens up new opportunities erasure coding replacements, e.g. RAID for disks, PARQ2 for data recovery, or as Reed-Solomon replacements for comms?