I'm not suggesting that; that's what it was. That was the tack they took with it from the day it was first announced, when they first tried to talk to Scott and Cameron years ago, then went to Carl Rinsch, and so on. That was their moonshot to try and bring the franchise out of the AVP doldrums. It ballooned into quite a different beast over time, and obviously YMMV on the film's quality, but they did clear the finish line for what they were aiming to do and are, according to Fox, proceeding apace.
It helps, I think, that Prometheus revealed itself to be this sweeping cosmic macro-saga to which the Alien franchise is actually kind of a side story. That both delineates the two stories and also allows anyone to take the future films anywhere, without having to necessarily get bogged down in AVP or whatever again. I like the shift in focus because it is something new. I think the franchise died for awhile because a lot of people had no idea how to make another movie either without Ripley or without the same premise of 'alien eats people in space.' They were trading mostly on the tropes of the first two films.
