Agreed with most points, largely it is timing (as with Flash's original stronghold and the re-up when it solved a huge video on the web problem with Flash video

Agreed with most points, largely it is timing (as with Flash's original stronghold and the re-up when it solved a huge video on the web problem with Flash video i.e. Youtube rush). However Snap.svg (snapsvg.io) made by the Raphael creator and backed by Adobe seems to be the best vector animation replacement yet. It is really a mashup of Flash vector and Silverlight declarative style, almost an iteration (you still lose the compiled nature of it and very good compression by default though as it isn't swf -- just like Silverlight). Still nothing has all the features of flash except maybe Unity, minus the vector part, but plugins are looked at in a worse light now. So we are in this transitionary stage where the new stuff is better but it takes much more work to get it to do the same across all platforms. WebGL, hardware accelerated <canvas> and <svg> and libs that glue those nicely like Three.js or 2D EaselJS and vector libs like Snapsvg will see it through, or further iterations of those. Once WebGL takes hold across all browsers and a couple years we will be in new, more capable hardware accelerated lands. Flash was a big software rendering, CPU hogging bummer at the end.