Anyone following the Flash vs. HTML5 debate

Question

Hey everyone. I have been developing systems in Flex3/4 and AS3 for two and a half fantastic years now.
Flex and AS3 have been an absolute pleasure to work with. True OOP support, creating subcomponents a piece of cake, great development tools, 
cross browser compatibility, seamless integration with J2EE server components, great support forums, fantastic eco system.  Making things visually pleasing and interesting, while being very usable, reusable (from an OO perspective)  in any other language is just not possible at this time. I could go on and on. 
Lately I have read debates about HTML5 vs. The Flash Runtime.
My response. You're kidding me right. There is nothing to compare here. HTML5 and JavaScript. I would much rather swallow my tongue than code anything in either HTML, or JS. I had the unfortunate experience with a project coding in HTML and JS a few years ago. My stomach hasn't been right since. In all fairness to the HTML/JS hackers out there. Sure if you're developing web pages or a web site. Then sure, the HTML,CSS,JS thing will do you good. 
However. Serious web applications that present scientific data, and retrieve that data from a DB Server, like for instance, the stuff I'm working on. Need a web UI that can present that information in a creative and imaginative way.
As well as the ability to make the code modular, OO, and use best practice patterns like IOC,DI, as well as, integrate, easily with a backend J2EE service.  The natural choice here is Flex/AS.
So what if the flash runtime environment burns a lot of compute cycles on your desktop.  Are you kidding. Irrelevant. Steve Jobs is the last guy that should be criticizing that aspect of Flash. Ever heard of a product
called NeXT. This was one of Steve Jobs visions that tanked. Why. This was a clear case of the software being too advanced for the hardware, at the time to handle. So. You critics that blast flash in that context. Just shut up. The hardware will catch up. It always does. Ever heard of Moore's Law. 
Anyways. I'm tired of hearing the bashing of the Flash runtime. Sometimes I think developers follow the masses, just for, well, being one of the herd. 

Answer 1

Having fought this battle at work for way too long, I can tell you that it mostly boils down to ideology.
Our product was originally a in house Java library that generated AJAX components. After it became unmaintainable (only 5 guys trying to create a product and maintain the library) I started looking into Flex. Flex did everything we were trying to do with AJAX and then some but there were those who fought me tooth and nail to go the HTML5 route.
They threw everything and the kitchen sink at me trying to dissuade management from going the Flex route. They would dig up ancient problems with the flash player, you name it. Steve Job's statements about Flash didn't help either. What won them over (or finally made them shut up) was the fact that there were no good HTML5 dev environments like there is for Flex.
What seemed to drive them was partially not percieving Flex as being open source and partially actionscript was new and unknown to them. Like the saying goes: If you have a hammer everything looks like a nail.
HTML5, Javascript and AJAX have their place. But if you want to write actual applicaitons Flex is the way to go.