I guess my feeling could be summed up with... if you're going to be on an unpopular system, expect a less-polished experience. When Windows took up 90% of desktop marketshare, and the rest was squabbled over by Mac, Linux, etc., the fact that Flash supported them at all should be seen as a blessing.
Yes and no. It was nice to have support for that whole community of animations and games, even with crappy performance. And we could get to the godawful interactive-restaurant-websites where framerates didn't matter. But the existence of a terrible Mac port helped fuel its adoption as a web technology (versus something like ActiveX where you were Windows/IE only). Without that, maybe those restaurants would have stuck to HTML like they should have to begin with.
Especially on the video side where people stared to pick FLV as a format, we'd have been much better off just getting an MPEG in the QuickTime plugin, probably with better frame rates and definitely not crashing my browser so often.
As a portable web application platform, I suppose it was better than Java and I'm glad to have gotten access to those. But honestly that was a pretty niche use case.
