Please convince me that animating in Flash doesn't suck.

Question

I'm a freelance animator coming from 3DS MAX and Maya, trying to do some flash (cs4) animations because I'm desperate for work.
There are things that bug me about animating in flash. I'm going to list them out, and if you have an answer or solution please reply and help me out.
To give a frame of reference, I am tasked with animating an intricate snake-like creature, made of several dozen separate pieces (symbols? objects?). All I am allowed to do is move, rotate, and scale them using "classic tween", I can't mess with the library, move pivots, or rearrange layers. I know that bones are in flash now, and would help with a lot of my frustrations, but the client does not want it to be rigged with bones for whatever reason. (I'm guessing importing into their old engine tech does not jive).
Ok. Here are my gripes:
1: I can't explain this, but the whole entire way flash works is completely alien to me coming from 3D animation. The way the key frames and timeline works is like trying to pilot an alien ship in some other dimension where nothing makes logical productive sense.
2: If I scrub the timeline to check movement, it unselects my objects, so I have to reselect them EVERY TIME?? This wastes soooo much time and is incredibly tedious.
3: Can I jump forward/back between keyed frames instead of just using < and > to go through each frame?
4: Playback is slow. What should be 30 fps plays back at 17 fps or less. Can I set it to "low quality" in flash itself..? It does not need to have anti aliased sprites while I'm animating.
    4a: Why doesn't it skip frames instead of play in slow mo? At least then I could get timing down.
5: Why can't I make a simple heirarchy of objects? I have to animate a neck made of 10 pieces (and another neck, and 2 tails).
6: Selecting multiple objects means I can sort of make a heirarchy, I guess... but do I really have to move the pivot every time? This is especially time consuming when everything gets unselected when I scrub the timeline.
7: Is there an Autokey? Do I have to select the exact frame of all the multiple layers I want to keyframe.. press F6, and then hit Q, and only then can I start to animate?
8: Sometimes I select objects and multiple frames in the timeline are highlighted automatically. so I press F6 to insert keyframe, and it makes a keyframe on all those highlighted frames rather than one frame. This means I have to pick what layers to animate by specifically selecting their frames.
9: I can't seem to use the distort tool. It's grayed out. Is this because I'm using Classic Tween?
That's what I can think of right now. Like I said above, Please, if you have a solution or work around for ANY of this, I beg you to fill me in
Thanks!

Answer 1

Hey Man, I've been using Flash for a long time and love it to death, but I can totally understand your gripes. They are quite valid.
As others have mentioned... its just different. It is really amazing what Flash allows you to do with just a minimal understanding of the basics. Once you start needing more advanced control... well it gets harder. Most people who start using flash just want their logo to spin... and not necessarily build a snake with joints:)
You mentioned you use Flash CS4. It allows 2 methods of tweening:
Classic Tween: All beginning and ending positions must be keyframed manually
Motion Tween: Auto keyframing similar to after effects.
From my position and long history with Flash I greatly prefer classic tweening. When I need something more advanced I use the TweenMax / lite Actionscript engine.  I find the new Motion Tweens to be a real pain, and unless I'm doing 3D tweens... I avoid them completely.
Once you start doing advanced CS4 Motion Tweens you are going to be manually adding specific Property Keyframes so I really don't find them to have an advantage unless there is something super specific I need to do.
Again its a matter of preference.
As for playback performance. Totally. If I want to make anything look good I set my FPS to 45. Most banner networks have limits of 18fps which is a real struggle to make look good. On a mac especially, the control > test movie output runs much worse then the browser plugin. Also in flash cs4 the stage has a live running instance of the flash player and it really doesn't handle things all that well. It is pretty ridiculous that a simple vector animation stutters at 30fps. I'm totally with you. The good news is the Flash Player / Plugin is getting better. Back in 98 or whenever flash hit the scene, most of our computers were running at what 233mhz with video cards with 8mb of ram. Yeah, sure then 12fps may have been asking a lot. But in this age of mulicore processors, dedicated graphics, highly optimized mobile graphics cards and limitless ram...shouldn't Flash play a little better?... YES! Current gen smartphones have more juice across the board then the desktops I started out with, higher resolution too!
I'm sure your 3D experience will carry over well. I'm sure a lot of us would like to take our flash skills to 3D. In no time you will find that it really can do what you want it to. It just takes a little time and a good deal and a ton patience;)
Best,
Carl
http://www.snorkl.tv/2010/08/flash-cs4-actionscript-3-0-and-tweenmax-random-tint-color-twe en/