Why macromedia... for love of god, why ?

Okay, so I decided to give flash programming a try. Around 2000 or so, I took a look AS, I was not impressed by what I saw. Now, in 2006 I took another look and though "hey, this is pretty nice". Thus, I thought I would whip up a few fun games with it. But as I am trying to do that, my rage at macromedia/AS is growing. I have extensive programmin experience in C, C++, Java, PHP and .NET and I am saddened by the fact that the flash platform and AS is the standard in which we must write "real time" interactive content for the web. Macromedia has done a huge disservice to programmer kind by making the flash platform in a way which requires you to engade in all kinds of wierd faggotry of the "Action Script" language to make programs in it.

Discuss.

>>10
__yes__, __python__ :) I know __this__ sucks, but pretty much everything about its syntax is ok to great.

>>11
Lua is amazingly fast, but it doesn't seem to have other advantages than that...

>>12
I also want to drop the X, they only added it to please stupid managers with all this bullshit XML hype. XML is not that good an idea for this, you usually do what fits best your problem and you don't need that damned huge parser when you can use native (JavaScript or whatever) code, for example.