Why Embedly? (can we... not have it?)

This is the first place I've encountered Embedly (my browser is using script-whitelisting, so I know it is) and I find it mildly annoying . Having stuff run through a third site just slows things down, and after looking into Embedly I don't understand the reason it is being used. It seems like the main features of it are things entirely irrelevant to a community forum like this. There is no content being hosted here that can benefit from their sharing feature, and as much as you Riot guys love analytical data I don't see why you would need stats for random videos being posted on the board.

I wouldn't even mind it so much if it would fail gracefully if I kept it off the whitelist. I can tell that it is just a standard link before the Embedly script (slowly) kicks in, and if it would just stay that way I could actually get to the content faster by opening it in a new tab directly. But instead the link just disappears.