Much like Unity today, one of the drivers of Flash popularity was that you could hack something together pretty quickly in a single interface. Throw a bunch of elements onto the "stage", add some scripting, and you're done.
In reality, though, serious applications or games seldom used the Flash IDE other than for designing/managing assets and packaging them (and sometimes not even for that). It was pretty bad in many ways for serious work. I used to create fully animated Flash websites and my work was 100% using FDT (an Eclipse plugin) and the external compiler (Flex SDK). It was way more sustainable.
Stripping the Flash IDE itself (or whatever it's called today) down to the animation essentials and allowing it to export in a number of formats (SVG, GIF, etc) would be the best thing for the app. Not sure it's the direction they're going, however.