Comment by giantrobot

Flash as an animation tool vs Flash as a web development tool are two very different discussions. There's overlap and they're related but still separate.

Flash was very interesting as an animation tool because it was at its core a vector drawing animation tool. All the scripting components were icing on the cake allowing automation of things that's incredibly tedious in traditional animation.

The fast vector animations made Flash very useful for web distribution. That's all well and good. But as it became the go-to for interactive websites the structure of Flash was antithetical to the web. Deep links became meaningless and content became locked behind Flash. Adobe was also a terrible steward of Flash and only put effort into Flash for Windows. Every other platform was an also-ran for them and the Flash experience was terrible.

The security of Flash was a bad joke on top of it all.

As an animation tool and delivery vector for interactive content beyond the abilities of browsers of the era it was useful. As the front end of the web it was an awful mess.