I agree with your first point, You cannot judge all by one.
It could be a student learning. Learning does involve initiative. However, learning from the top of the tree does not teach you much about its roots or environment.
That is not an insult, it is a truth. People, business especially, produce and request minority feature-sets for majority demands. See: design by committee, almost any production automobile, the majority of mobile phones, etc, etc.
So true. With both sides of the remote-face-delivery-portal implemented in HTML5, will the Flash (finally) end open up the internet for real creativity and minimal-capital moving content distribution?
technology is amateur. technology probably shouldn't be analyzed by analog methodologies either.
how apple(substitute any company) 'catches on' can be derived from http://ow.ly/59Maa. our perception isn't as important as the ubiquity of that which is available to perceive.
apple properties will catch on as long as they don't go out of business or lose the power to shout about their products(though this probably sits under the former).