Ha, if you were to make a decent Flash clone I would pay a not-insignificant amount of money for it as long as it’s not a subscription thing. I don’t have enough interest in that level of programming to make it myself.

My theory is that it's hard to create a usable tool in general and even harder if the domain is complex. Interactive animations are pretty complex.

Yeah, there’s some truth to that.

It also doesn’t help that it’s two pronged: Flash is an animation tool and a software development environment.

There are some great animation software packages out there like Toonboom or even something like Moho or Opentoonz, but as far as I am aware they do not have the same kind of direct integration with a programming language like Flash did.

On the other end of the end of the spectrum, you have tools like Game Maker which do have programming as a core feature, but you’re expected to do animations elsewhere and import them in.

So Flash is a competent tool across two complicated domains.