Hiring, Staffing, and Drag

We're going through staffing management right now. The question, of late, has been how does this affect project velocity and our ability to deliver on current sprint items. Well, we've had a number of issues. First, we split our core team to a 1.1 and a 2.0 team. Then we experienced a temporary staff loss on 2.0. I've been trying for about a month to get the 2.0 project off the ground, but have come up against a brick wall it seems. Any time I get time to work on it, that time is eaten up
by operational needs, or more recently interviewing and hiring.

The decision I've been struggling with is: Do we re-channel efforts to 1.1 and abandon 2.0 being left with one guaranteed success and one guaranteed failure, or do we split the drag across 1.1 and 2.0 and end up with two struggling projects? So far I've opted for one guaranteed success. I'm hoping to get 1.1 far enough along that it will take off on its own and we can launch 2.0. Then we just have to play major catch-up for the rest of the year.