I don't get it: Are you agreeing or disagreeing with what I said?
If you're right and the ideas were indeed ahead of their time, that means they were still a bad business proposition (at the time). The founders should take full credit for realizing this and adjusting accordingly.
Paypal's original idea is still a problem for people and it's similar to what Square is doing now.
Flickr's original idea is lot like the social MMOs we see now like FarmVille and many of the other Zynga games.