Java applets died out of technical reasons (and was replaced by flash)
Flash died, because it was proprietary and Adobe did not open it up. (and flash was vector animation btw.)
Otherwise it surely would still be around. And in a way it is, as you can export flash animations to the html canvas element. And some people do that (with quirks)
In other words, a simple, but powerful vector animation tool, is very much needed. The current state is a mess.
And you probably do not like vector animated advertisement, or websites that use animations for the sake of animations. Sure, no one wants that.
But how about games, or interactive graphic to for example show complex data in context to some map? Or animations for didactic purposes? Cartoons?
A animation well done is actually one, you do not notice. (but you would notice, if it was missing)
I think the iPhone refusing to support Flash had far more to do than the underlying business practices or IP.
But it had a reputation for being insecure, and for being slow — because it retained the ability to put vector animation on top of videos.
When HTML 5 was adopted with video playback tags (safer, faster, open), that killed it for web video.
If the Flash player would have been open in a way, chromium/webkit is, with many top players working on it - it very likely would still be around and maybe even dominating, as it was way superior in terms of features and more importantly, it was not a mess to work with, like HTML still is.
We do definitely need better vector graphics, including animations. Because then you can have the same crisp images and animations regardless of your resolution or screen size.
Do we, though?
We've already had animated GIFs, the marquee tag, Java applets, and Flash animation, and they've all died out because 99.9% of the time the animation is obnoxious and terrible. Vector animation would be just as annoying.