I used to be Flash game dev, but then I took a Flash coder day job to the knee. The plan was to use what I learned in my day job for my hobby endeavours. But the plan backfired because working with flash in my day job made spare time coding feel like work (I even used the same IDE
). So after a while I jumped ship to HTML5.
Flash did a lot of scouting for the web and made things possible long before browsers and the W3C could catch up. But open standards tend to win over proprietary platforms in the long run, so I think the decline of the Flash platform is a good change.
That said, As3 has some very good ideas; It does more things right than it gets credit for. The optional (but recommended) type safety is probably the best of them. I can not recall another language that does that so seamlessly.
These days, most of the serious AS3 developers have transitioned over to OpenFL. This is a HAXE-based port of the AS3 development environment that allows for much broader support. It allows traditional Flash AS3 devs to code up projects in the structure that they're familiar with, but build their projects to a whole slew of different platforms and devices. (including the Flash player, if you really want to)
I did not know this. Will check it out.