I completely agree and to me this is the "Flash Bones" problem. Despite one's opinion of Flash as a web alternative or its license, it was a great way to run i

I completely agree and to me this is the "Flash Bones" problem. Despite one's opinion of Flash as a web alternative or its license, it was a great way to run interactive content on a browser, and they kept adding features to their native IDE ("Flash" itself) and capabilities to the player (including the SWF spec). It eventually reached a point where there was not much more to add to it: it could play video (novel at the time) and audio (including live synthesis), use sockets, etc etc, and do some pretty advanced stuff supported by the player/spec. But none of that sold Flash IDE licenses, so they _had_ to add more features to the IDE. One of these features was the ability to do Bones, a pretty common animation feature. To me that's what marked the IDE decline. I used to create a lot of Flash content, but stopped using it at that point too. Not because of bones, but it was symbolic of the moment. I still created Flash apps for years, but it was always by creating fresh, "stage-less" projects, compiled from source code (the right way to go anyway). Bones itself is a great feature, but at the time Flash the IDE was already way behind other animation tools that exported to Flash like ToonBoom. Adding that feature just made it clear that they didn't know what direction to go with the IDE: it wasn't the best animation tool (despite having kickstarted a market!), it wasn't the best dev tool, just a bit of both with very few people who needed both. No surprise it stopped selling even while the platform was thriving online, circa 2010.