I think you'll find that the "X number of browsers" you need to check for and use fallbacks from HTML5 are "various flavours of IE". So please, let the griping continue.
This is because Microsoft has, for a long time, dragged its feet regarding the web because the web is a threat to its core business. In fact two main strands of HTML5 development are reverse engineering IE peculiarities and making them a standard so that others can interoperate and investigating ways to fix up IE with javascript shims so that it can support HTML5 without any help from Microsoft.
This is not the "right way" to do things but when the monopoly browser (and OS) producer varies between apathy and antagonism towards the web that's how progress gets made.
This is because Microsoft has, for a long time, dragged its feet regarding the web because the web is a threat to its core business. In fact two main strands of HTML5 development are reverse engineering IE peculiarities and making them a standard so that others can interoperate and investigating ways to fix up IE with javascript shims so that it can support HTML5 without any help from Microsoft.
This is not the "right way" to do things but when the monopoly browser (and OS) producer varies between apathy and antagonism towards the web that's how progress gets made.