It doesn’t take long when surfing the web to observe the general consensus that Flash is an expected standard, that it’s okay to say “If you don’t have Flash, my website won’t work.” Yet in the same regard, JavaScript is expected to degrade peacefully if the user does not have it enabled.
I personally favor the “HTML5” approach, in opposition to Flash, due to the poor performance Flash brings to Mac OS X and Linux
The overall outlook of the Flash way vs. the JavaScript way seems like the biggest challenge to me in Steve Job’s prediction of HTML5 overtaking Flash, and I personally haven’t seen any sign of change.
Am I missing something?
You’re talking about almost entirely different groups of people with very different worldviews. That’s why they say two different things. Very few people are both gung-ho Flash fanatics and slavish adherents to progressive enhancement.
For the people who support Javascript, one of the big reasons many do so is that it’s an open standard with free implementations that is accessible to anybody, not just those favored by Adobe. This feeling that Web content should be available to everybody on the Web also makes them hostile to Javascript that takes the same “My way or the highway” stance that led them to reject Flash.