I think it's about the nature of companies. If they're a tech-based comapny (or small) they tend to understand stuff better (or can be made to).

Aye. We (pH Group) are a relatively small company, although now we're part of Experian so maybe the future won't be so rosy.

Flash does quite a bit of the stuff you seem to want all ready, including text shadows. I hate Flash for a lot of reasons. If you work within the constraints of css, you can get a pretty rich website without needing to photoshop everything in sight. If you must photoshop well, there's photoshop. There's a few bitmap-handling tricks I'd like to see added to css though, including transparency, 8-bit alpha channel support, rotation etc..

Rotation is there, at least in some browsers - check "transform" command.