You're missing something. Filepicker is a great way to integrate on projects where you won't get paid $5-10k alone just for getting S3 secure uploads working. [cost of time]
But it still takes a while to implement, test, refactor, integrate if you're doing it at scale, distributed, and securely. I can pay $15 and have that done with minor integration. I've used it for just this. Their ability to upload from Dropbox, file system, S3, etc are really nice.
Ok, but what happens when they go bankrupt, or get bought out and have the rates doubled or service halved or otherwise ruined? What happens when they have downtime, and your customers complain, and you have to give them the excuse, "Sorry, but Filepicker is down," and they say, "Huh? Pileflicker? What's that? Just fix it! I need to upload now!"
Every external dependency or middleman you require hands over some control of your product or service to someone else. You put yourself in their hands and are at their mercy. And for what? Convenience? Laziness? When there are standard, proven, tested FOSS solutions that don't depend on middlemen, that you can debug and fix yourself?
Web sites are becoming far too interdependent. It wasn't many years ago when web sites had ZERO external, third-party resources, except banner ads. Now every page loads 35 JavaScripts from OTHER DOMAINS, all of which run in the context of the site the user is actually intending to visit. And several of them usually are required, or else the site looks horrible or breaks completely. It's madness.
I weep for what the web could have been. I don't think people realise what they're losing. Sure, you get some nice CSS or JS stuff, but we've lost platform independence.
Over the years there have been a few campaigns with little banner-buttons. Some of those have been bad ([BEST VIEWED WITH IE!]) but some of them were good.
It would be amazing if there was a campaign to get websites to validate, and to fall-back gracefully, and to be accessible.
I'd also love it if web creators would test sites on real hardware and real networks. My iPhone / android / 3G stick on GiffGaff or (what was) T-Mobile in SW UK is probably much worse than whatever you're using.
