is the authorship of bew titles possible? yes, it never stopped. check out the flash forward jam NG hosts annually

there are a few open source tools that can create SWFs, but the old adobe tools are the best unfortunately (up until cs6) thankfully those programs are floating around out there

the only thing about flash that really seemed to die was support from adobe (and they had long since stopped caring, good riddance) and the browser plugin itself. all the rest is all still up and going