Would you have been similarly bummed if Microsoft still had the same power? Silverlight for the web was a direct attempt to kill Flash and limit developers choices. Silverlight was also a factor in several US states extending the Microsoft antitrust settlement terms for 5 more years (till 2012) due to the fear that the Windows platform still has enough power to kill competition if a specific tech is embedded into it with a competitors excluded. Windows XP shipped with Flash. I'm sure Microsoft would have liked to bundle Silverlight into Vista and 7, when they also pulled out Flash.

Should it be easier for developers to do their jobs, at the cost of consumers choice and ease of use? While these two aren't always tied together, it seems they are for web development.

Situation 1. Developers have access to use Microsoft Visual Studio for Silverlight, Adobe Flash Professional for Flash, and other tools for HTML 5. Because of the developer choice here, consumers have to go manually download and install proprietary plugins on their platform, or in the case of Windows today, an alternate browser with proper HTML 5 support. Developers have to spend time writing across multiple languages if they want to reach the widest audience possible, or accept that the use of their app/site will be limited to a smaller group of people.

Situation 2. Developers have access to many tools from many companies, but they all output HTML 5 code. Consumers can just use the browsers they have, on almost any device they have. And competition will be in the tools and browser side, to see who can make the best development tool or runtime platform, not the best development language that ends up fragmenting the market.

Situation 2 seems to be where the web is headed, with even Microsoft putting in the proper effort to get IE 9 up to the same level Mozilla, Apple, Google, and Opera have been at in the browser arena for ages. Adobe is developing HTML 5 tools, and many other companies are too. So while developers won't have a wide choice of languages to choose from, they will still have a wide choice of tools to work with. And that little bit of choice restriction on the development side then makes things much simpler, and much more consistent for the people that mater, the end users of the developers content. Without the end users (be it actual home users, or just other coworkers in an office) to consume the content, there wouldn't be a need for developers.