I agree and I share the same experience. Started with Flash 3 making buttons animate on a web-page, and ended with a state-of-the-art compiler product (SWF2Go 2007–2012) that was copied by competitors including Adobe.

I remember to use Branden Hall’s XMLq lib with my e-banking demo for a major bank, and also, using OOP in Flash 5 for multi-tab, realtime social platform using XML sockets. It was like writing future.

Almost 2 years ago, I finally wrote long over due note https://www.orison.biz/blogs/chall3ng3r/2015/08/imminent-death-of-adobe-flash/

I miss sometimes how easy doing stuff in Flash was, but now there are better and powerful tools and tech, not easy, but it gets the job done.

Happy to be one of the Flash nerds :)