Decades ago the problem was considered a "deadend" because it was hard to solve but seemed unrelated to any other fields of mathematics and solving it wouldn't

Decades ago the problem was considered a "deadend" because it was hard to solve but seemed unrelated to any other fields of mathematics and solving it wouldn't yield any techniques or partial solutions that could crack other well-known problems. I wonder if that thinking has changed in the age of Computer Science since solving this kind of recursive/iterative problem might open up new ways to analyze algorithms or tackle the Halting Problem for some classes of programs.