There have been several threads on Drupal's development list as well as the Duplicated modules hall of shame about duplication of functionality in contributed modules.
I wrote SWF Object API to address the need to have an API for modules to embed their own flash. At the time, there were no options for doing this. However, in the intervening time, the SWF Tools module has started providing a much more comprehensive mechanisms for embedding flash in a variety of ways.
