To be fair, there weren't many (any?) standardized alternatives back then. There was no particular incentive for Adobe to support, say, Red5 when there was no

To be fair, there weren't many (any?) standardized alternatives back then. There was no particular incentive for Adobe to support, say, Red5 when there was no standard to gather around. Apple's HLS is a pretty recent attempt at moving toward a documented standard. If you're talking about streaming .flvs off of a regular Apache setup, then it shouldn't be surprising that scrubbing and seeking are troublesome: static file servers weren't build for that use case. What would you have preferred Adobe to have done?