It's a great reminder that Flash at the time was way beyond any other technology for the designers and animators who were the primary users of it.

And the fact is that most of the open technologies take years in order to become as full-featured as the closed-source ones. By that time the trend that artists were following is out of fashion.

By the way - if we think about it. Are there yet any actual tools that allow you to program SVGs as easily as you could once program Flash? I understand it's technically possible to compile from Flash sources to SVG, but are there actual tools yet?