The major exceptions are flash video and flash games. The former will soon be a thing of the past (and really, does it make sense to have an tag, but require external plugins to render basic video files?), and the latter will probably remain for at least a while longer, but the primary non-Flash mobile platform doesn’t actually have a dearth of casual games available to it.

“Users want to see the whole web” is only part of the truth — and outside those two major categories, very little of The Whole Web requires Flash — in part because, as you say, people provide alternate versions without Flash (at least for small-screen mobile devices). Given that this is apparently a necessity, does Flash really provide enough extra compared to an AJAX implementation to compensate for maintaining both versions?

The main use of Flash now seems to be videos. That is changing. There are better players starting to show up, and HTML 5 is offering a supported alternative.

For example, you *can’t* select and copy text on flash sites. Unless,
as you point out, the developer goes out of their way to let you.
Which is ridiculous to start with (for both the user and the
developer) and frequently forgotten. That this is even a possible
outcome of flash is kind of a failure of the platform.

There are similar rejoinders for most of them: Flash isn’t
*reasonably* supported on mobile devices, because it uses too much
cpu/battery. You can’t use the back button unless you go out of your
way to support it (somewhat true with ajaxy sites as well). That the
mousewheel ever didn’t work is a joke. Etc. etc.

But the big deal, and the issue that all of these little problems fall
out of is this: Flash is closed.

Flash being closed means that we don’t get quality implementations on
the platforms that Adobe doesn’t care as much about. Flash being
closed means we don’t get bugs fixed. Flash being closed results in
security risks. Flash being closed means that platform developers
would be happy if it just went away. And that’s really what’s at the
heart of Apple’s rejection of Flash.

As for me, I’m a Free Software bigot, and run Linux, and that means I
don’t ever load flash at all on my main workstation. So when I hit a
site that’s flash-required I know that they don’t actually want to get
their message out. Flash is not the web, it’s just a thing that some
people use in concert with the web.

Also the whole point of Flash is that being vector based, it can fit an excellent animation into a tiny file size that simply couldn’t be done in HTML.

Also Flash is completely cross browser unlike HTML that has different ‘quirks’ in every single browser – Flash you write once and it’s identical across the board

- The fact that basic usability features need to be hard coded by the programmer (Flash) rather than being constrained by the medium (HTML/CSS) is what drives ordinary users away from Flash content in droves. Combined with poor performance, this is lethal.

There are no constraints in Flash to force “good programming” or good usability practices. Sadly, this is what makes these “myths” actual fact and why Flash has such a bad reputation.