Flash started it's carrier as "Future Splash". It was a catastrophic application, just as early flash - never the less, Flash has become popular. This resulted in that with it's 6.0 version it's now somewhat usable now.
It still has annoying bugs from the initial release though, along with some nonsense functions in the FlashMX editor.
It has the ability to make ppl think it's more than what it is - but I won't like it just because of that. It is good for what it was intended for though - 2D vector/spline animation and display.
With the last versions it's now able to handle animations and bitmaps somewhat better, even it's language is evolving, but the bottleneck of the whole is the poor design of the original building blocks.
Just my opinion on the subject as a webdesigner :-)
