Honestly, as a website dev during the height of flash's dominance, I think you're a little off with your hatred.

During this time, it was extremely rare to have a designer involved in website design (I can't prove it, but I think you'll see a correlation with the growth of template sites at the time, I broke my back trying to learn design and color theory at the time and I still can't even draw a straight line freehand :) so what I normally had to deal with was the client as designer. Complete nightmare...

Here's one anecdotal data point:

I was designing an eshop for a client. He demanded a long flash intro to the site. I tried to lead him through an idea-

You want customers? Yes. You want repeat customers? Yes. You want them to have to wait 30 seconds every time they shop to watch your intro? Errr, yes! Ok.....

So I snuck in a huge skip intro button on the flash intro...

Call from client: 'hey, my buddies tell me that the intro is ruined by a big button saying 'skip intro'. Remove it now!!! It's degrading the experience!!!'

I tried, but hey, I got paid, and his business suffered in the long run- and I mean went bankrupt...

I know of few developers at the time who wanted to do flash intros. It was normally forced on them...

Most Flash sites were pretty bad (the first site I made was Flash, and it was bad), but it was also used to create possibly the finest website ever made.

http://superior-web-solutions.com/

Turn the sound up, and definitely do not skip the intro. It'll bring a tear to your eye.

I enable flash to watch this, I will never get back this 5 minutes of my life, DANGER DO NOT VISIT

One thing is for sure, it brought a tear to my eye.

Oh come on, it's not that bad - it's not like it set fire to your computer or anything.

It's just an amazing example of what you can do with Flash, and why you shouldn't.

I can't be sure that if this is a joke or not

Not a joke. Here's an actual site they did:

http://industrialpainter.com/