OMG im not naming any names but all of you that have been arguing that flash cs4 and onward are bad are just plain dumb k? k heres why.
You say "oh they keep adding shit" but the thing is, THEY KEEP ADDING, and they're making it easier for the yung-uns to pick it up too. For example, the new motion tween takes some getting used to, but beleive it or not its actually directly based off of after effects's method of tweening complete with motion editor which is LOVELY!
Bone tool isn't terrible, in fact it makes inverse kinematics a thing of the past, if you customize your own brush the spray tool is lovely for spekely stuff, the 3D tool is GREAT for lots of stuff too. I've been experimenting and plan on putting it to use soon enough.
What I'm trying to get at, is while they keep adding things that people may not want, they're not TAKING anything from it. Its not like they're going "well, nobody REALLY likes the pen tool so were getting rid of it", its still the same program as flash MX/04 but with MORE built into it so that you have MORE tools at your disposal. Now i'm speaking from an animators point of view, as glaiel pointed out they also added alot on the programming side, probably more than the tools side.
On a side topic that HDX mike brought up:
toonboom is much more professiona and advancedl in terms of creating animations, i recently got a copy with my school and have been playing with it a bit, but it doesn't make flash look like shit. It just focuses everything about it into traditional pencil/paper animation, which is really neat. my MAIN problem with it is the toonboom-flash intergration, once i figure out how to move a toon-boom made animation INTO flash to work the preloaders and menu's, i'll PROBABLY switch to full toonboom for exile and what not.
(If anybody knows how to do this, let me know as i'm totally interested and cant find much on the web)
-JD