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.

My friend tried to induce me, how superb flash is. He has made some realy nice guestbook in flash. It had nice design, all the functions and even wasn't very big...

So I opened some simple page in my browser. I resized window back and forth and asked: "Can flash do this?" Then I selected part of text with mouse. "Can flash do this?" I copied it to the clipboard using keyboard. "Can flash do this?" I scrolled down using mouse wheel. I magnified text size back and forth. "Can flash do this?" I saved some bookmark from that page. I saved picture using right-clicking. "Can flash do this?"

There's no need to mention such things as rendering engine, consumption of memory, necessity of third-side program. Just demonstrate all those things written above. It takes about one minute and no one can argue against it.

(>>2: Sorry for my bad English but not everyone is native speaker and not everyone has had it at school)