Flash was actually pretty great. The big problem with it was the "oh, that thing? it's still around?" attitude of Adobe, which led to massive security problems.

Flash was actually pretty great. The big problem with it was the "oh, that thing? it's still around?" attitude of Adobe, which led to massive security problems. Actionscript was a pretty good language, certainly around the level of what Javascript has become. It was poor-mouthed for the same reasons Javascript was (is?), but now we use Javascript to run 90% of the Web. I remember back in the early 00s playing with the PHP Flash module. It was a really interesting environment that had a lot of promise. But, alas, it was doomed.