That depends. At ProPublica we've done a bunch of visualizations with canvas and SVG in the past, and they are powerful tools. However, as part of our investigation into Hurricane Sandy flooding we knew we wanted to make a 3D visualization of NYC of show the storm surge:
If your data is inherently 3 dimensional I'd say it is worth the effort to dive in, but the majority of visualizations that we do are charts and plots which don't really need to be 3D.
http://projects.propublica.org/nyc-flood/
If your data is inherently 3 dimensional I'd say it is worth the effort to dive in, but the majority of visualizations that we do are charts and plots which don't really need to be 3D.