Okay, I think I see the root of my dilemma.

With the Object tag, even if the browser supports the tag, if the object can't load, you still get the non-object items between <object> and </object>.

With the <noembed> tag, you only get what's between the tags if the browser doesn't support embedding at all, which is a completely different situation than "the embedded object can't load". I really need a conditional command that supports the latter, and I don't think it exists.