I disagree programmers will take Flash the IDE seriously. There is a reason Macromedia made Flex. The clean, ECMA Script standard API helped too. Flash only gets the latter, not the first.

User experience, too, isn’t necessarely true. Faster code execution doesn’t mean better user experience. Again, a lot apps would benefit from faster framerate, not code execution.

Anyway, a lot of additional good points, and more good stuff in the comments about workflow.

The AS3 components are significantly smaller. Currently, a SWF with one AS3 Button component in it is 16 KB, versus 27 KB for the same V2 AS2 component. A movie with AS3 Button, ComboBox and TextArea is 39 KB, versus 59 KB in V2. Both cases are a 33% improvement.

“At the end of the day, it seems for quick and dirty apps, prototyping, or just good ole small in scale Rich Internet Applications, you’d use Flash vs. Flex”

Especially if you consider that many of the interfaces I prototype are _not_ for the web, and hence I get no benefit from all the Flex components (nor even Flash v2 for that matter). Every day I find myself examining each tiny aspect of a prototype and saying “what’s the chance that this little piece needs to be flexible/maintainable/reusable?” If it’s high, I throw it into a loosely-typed AS2 class. If it’s low, I’ll get dirty and throw in a timeline tween. Sorry, but it’s still impossible to beat the speed you can get with an old timeline tween when the request is “make that element rotate, scale, change color, and move across the screen at the rate of about 1 second.”

But what if you guess wrong and you need to change that later? Well guess what– you only wasted 45 seconds setting it up on the first place.

How all this relates to AS3? I dunno exactly. Guess it’ll be similar to making the jump to AS2. We’ll just have to look at each project and decide if there’s enough benefit to make it worth the “strictness.” From what you’re suggesting, it might not be.