I had a lot of hopes after the Adobe buyout that Flash would morph into something based around ActionScript (ES4) and SVG. That didn't happen. MS's Silverlight/XAML was close, but I wasn't going to even consider it without several cross-platform version releases.
I was as well. It wasn't as bad as people describe it. It was an amazing platform, HTML5 just recently caught up.
In retrospective, Adobe should have open sourced it.
>MS's Silverlight/XAML was close
Hahahahahha, yeah sure! That tells me everything I need to know.
As for Silverlight, I mean the technology itself was closer to where I wanted to see Flash go. I'm not sure why you're laughing at that.
edit: as for not being as bad as people describe it... you could literally read any file on the filesystem... that's a pretty bad "sandbox" ... It was fixed later, but there were different holes along the way, multiple times.