If decent Pods had been around when I started vaping I might never have looked any further.
Not sure if they would have worked though. Part of the quitting process for me was being absorbed in the vaping activity. Like spending many hours a day on ECF, being part of a club, discussing it with other people. Fussing with my tanks and batteries trying to get them to work properly. Researching and buying better gear. It was a full time job for a while, and it kept my mind off cigarettes. Something I could just pull out of my pocket and suck on might not have filled the hole.
Hard to tell though. Who knows what might have been.
That vaping was fun and choices were yours to make were important to me in the early days too. New flavors and equipment certainly helped draw me toward vaping and keep thoughts of smoking from coming up. Should there be only a couple approved options and flavors, an ecig becomes a less tolerable compromise more than a choice for the existing smoker.
If pod pricing equates to cigarette pricing and liquid flavor choices are limited, I expect more existing smokers will become dual users, vaping when necessary but continuing to smoke as the pricing and flavor make it a toss up.