Flash wasn't ridiculed because of how it looked. The principle of integrating interactive content into web pages is a fine one, so long as it's done in a way that's semantically consistent, machine readable, searchable, accessible, reliable, not too obtrusive, forgiving of network latency and performance, cross-platform, cross-device, and tolerant of errors -- the web, in other words. Flash was... not.

That doesn't mean we stop trying to make web pages look prettier.