I've worked in Flash for a decade. My experience with it has gone from dabbling with it in high school to experimenting with it in college to doing serious AS development in professional design work. I've come to a certain level of familiarity with and acceptance of its shortcomings, while trying to hone my sense of where it is and isn't appropriate to use.

And alas, it feels like that "is" part gets just a tiny bit smaller every day. For all its quirks and annoyances, Flash is a great environment and it opened the door to really rich web experiences long before the W3C ever imagined them. It still has a lot of advantages today, but the W3C is quickly catching up, and I get a definite sense that Adobe is losing the focus that Macromedia once had. They're continuing to develop Flash as if today were just a futuristic version of 2003. But Flash isn't going to stay relevant in a vacuum.

One of these days, someone (maybe even Apple) is going to come out of nowhere with a beautiful, visual HTML5 Canvas + JS authoring suite and Adobe is going to realize just what they've been taking for granted. And by then it may be too late.