Now that I've joined Ethlabs I can answer my own question.
We see EF as the shepherd of Ethereum's soul aka CROPS, which is what will ensure Ethereum's relevance in a 10-to-100-year timescale.
Ethlabs wants to help Ethereum win the next 2-5 years. To that end, we will be very pragmatic with addressing the pain points of builders and users TODAY, both through our own engineering/research efforts and through pushing EF/core devs to allocate resources in that direction.
Ethereum needs both EF and Ethlabs. Let's win together.