1) All information on it is 100% visible to search engines. Flash embedding replaces HTML code underneath, and search engines read the HTML. We even have our google webmaster tools account that proves this, we fetch our pages as the googlebot and it sees all of our info just fine.

2) Flash doesn’t load slower. In fact it’s more capable of using less Kb and less server requests. Your statement is the equivalent of saying “cars with painted flames go faster”. No they don’t…faster cars have a higher percentage of owners that paint flames on their car…but painted flames themselves have no bearing on the car’s speed. And likewise the sites chosen to be made in flash tend to be promotional microsites, photography sites, etc that simply need more image based content to show…but flash itself does not make for any larger of a site.

3) We have full analytics support. Not only for page browsing, but even for things like events of people using the contact form, viewing portfolio images, etc. Flash’s AS3 is a very capable language that actually expands how much you can track using analytics, not diminishes it.

4) We have fully crawl-able linking. Flash doesn’t “hurt” anything about SEO or semantics, it just doesn’t do much to help it. But flash replaces a div of HTML to show…so you put the alternate content in that div. It’s really not that hard, I could teach you to make fully seo friendly flash in about 10 minutes.

5) This last part:

“the browser has to load the flash player (or worse, ask that it be installed), then load the entire site or section of site contained in the flash object.”

That’s quite misleading. The browser doesn’t have to load any player: flash is a pre-installed plugin that almost all browsers already have, and the ones that don’t just see the alternate HTML underneath if you did your job right. The only thing that has to load is a single swf format file (less server requests) that is a streamable format (less wait time before you see content) and is compiled bytecode (considerably smaller than ASCII type files that have to load for the same layout compexities and data in HTML/CSS/JS).

The lesson to be learned here is that Flash is what you make it become. Flash is only bad if you make bad Flash. Be picky about who makes your flash sites.