Old web's patch is for the most part optional, if you don't want the shinies. With "new" web, what is there to disable if your hw can't handle it's stress?
Not entirely, as it's only recently that anything even remotely challenging Flash has been a viable option, and where fallbacks / functional pages without it exist frequently.
I do agree with your second point, however. Is it too much to hope that the standard JS libraries will eventually support scalable shininess?
