Simple games run very slowly on iPad

Question

I gave the iPhone packager a spin last night and tested it using the demos off of Flixel, a popular bitmap game engine to benchmark performance. Although I was happy that I could get these demos running on my iPad rather quickly, the performance of the games was disappointing, averaging around 10 FPS, which is well below playable. These are very simple demos that run at 60 FPS on any desktop.
This is one such example.
http://flixel.org/flxinvaders/
Am I expecting too much from the packager, or is this cause for concern?

Answer 1

I would not say that the devguide is memorized by me yet, but I have read it and I get the gist.  I did overlook the portion discussing vector drawn objects being slower and removing nested children to make them siblings (though that nesting seems a bit of a limitation and might require a number of design pattern hoops to jump through to implement that well in a large game).  I understand cacheAsBitmap and use it when needed - but lack of scaling and rotation (which is what I first animated if you reread above) invalidates cacheAsBitmap anyway and is a huge limitation.
I wasn't stating anything as fact or proof anywhere in ANY of my posts.  I came to this forum as someone open to learning, but also to see other developers experiences.  There is very little on the web as of today that discusses the ins and outs of the limitations or constraints of the translation of SWF to IPA by the Packager.  I have yet to see any app created in this fashion that does animate smoothly so that along with as I said very initial and preliminary tests have disappointed me.
I mentioned my experience as a developer for no other reason that to indicate that I am an AS3 person who loves Flash and wants to set the tone so it didn't appear that I'm coming in here trolling or bashing flash.  The fact is I have done alot of high end AS3 work in Flash and Flex and totally dig it as a platform - I want Flash apps to work well on iOS.
Apparently I was naive to think my AS3 knowledge was enough to create simplistic but smooth animations quickly with the translation.  Clearly something is going on with the approach the Packager takes and that introduces constraints in the way the drawing is handled which results in poor frame rates without GPU (if that is indeed what is happening in my initial test).
I'm happy to reread that section in the pdf and scour it for optimization techniques of sibiling children etc and do that.  Clearly I missed some of that and was hoping to get some pointers here from the horse's mouth so to speak of developers who DO have it working.
It's easy to say "you're no advanced coder" and sit back and say "I've done it you suck- how dare you besmirch Flash". But believe me mr12Fingers I am not claiming something can't be done.  I am saying I could not achieve decent animation quickly and have not seen one single animation in ANY iPhone or iPad Packager app that is as smooth as a typical high framerate 2D game written in xcode Obj C.
Saying I'm blindly conducting tests is innaccurate.  I hardly said I've exhaustively benchmarked the Flash Packager's performance.  I said it was my first time "taking it for a spin" and it was a hello world app and that I had problems with the results and haven't seen anything to tell me different.  It's kind of blind in my opinion to have blinders on to anyone who doesn't have the same experience as you.
Please take the time to help or assist or point me in the direction of achieving that, or confirm my very preliminary but disheartening results which my hello world type apps and what is actually out there seem to indicate to me.  Or if you can't do any of that then please don't muddy the conversation with being adversarial.  I don't intend to be and would love to hear what you or anyone who has a different experience than my initial ones with the Packager.
thank you for telling me that you had no trouble with your cert.  Can you please elaborate on what steps you took to use the same Mac cert from the keychain and use it in a windows 7 bootcamp with the packager.  Whenever I tried that the Packager would fail with "invalid certificate" (though that cert works in Xcode on the mac) and the only way I could get the Packager to work was to regenerate the cert on Windows using the OpenSSL method after revoking the original one.
Clearly I am new to the DRM methods of iOS development, but the steps in the pdf didn't fully work for me.
Thanks for any assistance, and please let's make this conversation a bit more helpful for each other rather than adversarial.