Can the Java Plug-In compete?

It's a strange day for Desktop Java developers when AjaxWorld is publishing an article about using Swing for your client-side technology, while the Java sites are asking whether the Java Plug-In is even viable.

For the Plug-In story, we'll begin with Marvin Warble's editorial, "Can the Plug-In Compete", which he posted both as a Javalobby editorial and as the beginning of a thread on the java.net forums:

I'm not the first person to ask this question, nor will I be the last. It is unbelievable to me that the company that invented the RIA over a decade ago has made little or no progress in this field and presents absolutely no challenge to inferior technologies that came later. JavaScript was named "Java" script deceptively to give it better visibility in the marketplace, but given its dominance in the RIA market, you'd never believe it.

Having walked away from the ever-brittle Ajax market to develop his own Java-based RIA product, Marvin reports that many developers reject it out-of-hand because it depends on the Java plug-in:

This has been a major disappointment to say the least. I knew that applets had developed a stigma over the years, but I didn't realize how pronounced the distaste for the plug-in had become. The negativity and skepticism within the Java community itself is so overwhelming that any hope for wide acceptance of the plug-in seems impossible. The funny thing is that all the developers I have talked with would like the plug-in to become widely accepted, but in order for it to become widely accepted, it would have to be used, however, most website developers are hesitant to use it, because, well, it's not widely accepted.

So how does the plug-in gain traction? In a follow-up post, he says that a scatter-shot appeal to hobbyists and other amateurs won't make the Java Plug-In viable:

Here's the problem - if I can't use Sun's technology to compete in the real world, than I'm forced to use one of those other guy's (MS or Adobe) products. That's just the reality of the situation. Not all of us are hobbyists. Some of us are actually trying to make a living in this business. And to do that we need to be able to compete with those other guys. Is Sun just in it to give hobbyists new toys to tinker with or are they actually trying to compete? If they are interested in competing, which I'm assuming they are since they are a publicly traded company and they have invested the time and money to rewrite the plugin and create JavaFx, then they need to provide the users of their products the means to also compete. Otherwise, in order to survive, we'll be forced to use a product that will allow us to compete. I want to use Java to develop RIA solutions. I don't want to use JavaScript or Flex or Silverlight.

So how about you? What would convince you that you could deploy a business application that depended on the Java Plug-In?