No more ew than people being on IE.
In my opinion, flash is a viable alternative where modern technologies aren't able to be used, especially if it's a trivial enhancement.
This looks awesome - as long as all (or at least most) of the suggestions it makes are actually improvements in some meaningful way. Perhaps including a performance analysis and automated functionality test to assess the suggested change's effects?
it may not necessarily be that we're having a hard time, but that there are technologies or practices that can make our work faster, more scalable, more readable, or in some way better than the standards.
That's not necessarily to say that there is a problem with our HTML/CSS/JS, just that certain things work better for certain projects or developers.
How would this site be different to the current model of finding a solution to a difficult problem (ie. first MDN/Dev docs, then StackOverflow, then Quora)?
All of those things are fairly trivial for FB to track. Age (obvious), Location (trackable through Places, geolocation, etc. through that thing in your pocket), Gender (presumably you would post a status update about something that big?), Employment (status, amassing colleagues as 'friends'?).
It seems like they've hit on a constantly self-updating demographic info machine...