To go its own way, is never the wrong decision IMHO. However, creating and further developing such a projects needs a lot of well-skilled programmers. Thus, I would have wished that some parts of the ETH development will also directly implemented in ETC.
So far from what I have seen and heard from the devs and community is that ETC is charting it's own course. There will be an update coming in the future to disable the difficulty bomb and keep POW in some form. This will effectively make ETC incompatible with ETH. Lots of interesting stuff coming already on ETC. So we are not bound to ETH for our future.