Gian-Carlo Rota made a related comment in his article ["The Many Lives of Lattice Theory"][1] (Notices of the AMS, Volume 44, Number 11, December 1997, p. 1442):

"Dedekind outlined the program of studying the ideals of a commutative ring by lattice-theoretic methods, but the relevance of lattice theory in commutative algebra was not appreciated by algebraists until the sixties, when Grothendieck demanded that the prime ideals of a ring should be granted equal rights with maximal ideals. Those mathematicians who knew some lattice theory watched with amazement as the algebraic geometers of the Grothendieck school clumsily reinvented the rudiments of lattice theory in their own language. To this day lattice theory has not made much of a dent in the sect of algebraic geometers; if ever it does, it will contribute new insights. One elementary instance: the Chinese remainder theorem. Necessary and sufficient conditions on a commutative ring are known that insure the validity of the Chinese remainder theorem. There is, however, one necessary and sufficient condition that places the theorem in proper perspective. It states that the Chinese remainder theorem holds in a
commutative ring if and only if the lattice of ideals of the ring is distributive."

I think this sheds some light on the question "What did Rota think would happen?" as Ben Webster interpreted the question.


  [1]: http://www.ams.org/notices/199711/comm-rota.pdf