Yeah, the hilarious part of that being that Adobe, even prior to Steve Jobs's "flash sux" response, had begun to wander away from a purely ActionScript model into declarative markup via Flex.

I'm not 100% certain that declarative is wrong for presentational information. It just sucks that HTML + CSS are so messy. I'd even go for something that had a more parsimonious (note: not coupled tho) relationship between presentation/structure.