I hate to nit-pick, but I agreed with you up until this point. YouTube will definitely attract any publisher who wants a little profit or takes themselves seriously, but more creative? Meh, that's objective. I've seen some sick videos on Vimeo, that I couldn't even find on YouTube. Again, I do agree that the adsense program is a defining factor for most publishers.
Vimeo has much more creativity, video wise; they have amateur uploading their edits made no Adobe After Effects, Sony Vega, music video edits with much more quality than YouTube. YouTube is social network, Vimeo is more of a exposure for media artists.
We've been creating video tours of our products and find that Vimeo works better for our needs. The interface is neat and clean, videos download quickly and the vimeo site lends a more professional look and feel. For our needs it works quite well.
I don't think that most of the people putting up their videos on Vimeo are looking to cash in. They're looking for expression. Or a great player w/ a clean embed for their websites. Or less clutter.
For me, youtube wins this, mainly for the bulk upload capability. I don't want to spend forever dealing with video by video uploads, that's just a waste of my time!
