Why is Flash Pro being deprecated??

Question

It seems like Adobe is blowing off Flash Pro more and more and I find it disturbing. 
I develop prototypes for Android apps.  Flash is SOOOOO much better for prototyping and rapid, X-platform conceptualization than ANY other product out there. 
Nothing else (e.g. Edge Animate, Axure, Proto.io, etc...) even comes close for designers to use! 
I can create fully functional prototypes of anything at all, in 1/10th the time and with 10x the level of flexibility that can be achieved with a prototype built by some engineer in native Android. (As for the wonderful HTML5 that Adobe keeps pushing - give me a break!  Maybe in 5 years it'll catch up, but for now it doesn't compare to the power of Flash to meet the needs of a rapid, iterative design process.)
The Flash Pro forum isn't even listed on the main page of Adobe Communities?  You have to search for it.  :-(

Answer 1

I'm going to weigh in here as someone is both a designer and developing enterprise-level apps in Flash. I'd write a book about the concepts I use, which I call "semantic Flash" if I thought there were enough people interested in learning a whole new way of developing Flash to make it worth investing the time.
I personally think the AS3 version of Flash is beautiful and elegant and the changes had to happen to make Flash a viable product for as long as it has lasted. However, what happened is that Macromedia dropped the ball when it came to Flash 9/AS3. I say Macromedia because the decisions that were made happened prior to the acquisition. For whatever reason, someone decided that large-scale development couldn't be done in Flash using the timeline, so they put all of their eggs in the Flex basket for that side of things. And really everything. If you recall, Flash Player 9 didn't actually work very well with the timeline, because Macromedia focused so many resources on making it work for Flex they didn't have much left for in Flash.
Just seeing how the timeline actually does function, though, I believe there originally was someone on the team who had a vision of how this could work amazingly well with the timeline. I think that person probably left unfortunately before this vision could be conveyed to anyone else for whatever reason. So we were left with a dichotomy where "real developers" don't use the timeline and "designers" are completely intimidated by the code side. And this was something originated by how Adobe documented Flash and Flex in 2007. We now have very few people who can cheerfully marry both sides, mainly because many people see doing this as a little bit "icky."
When I spot someone on these forums who I think has the ability and the interest to learn to do that, I'll try to coach them, but I know that I'm asking them to take a huge risk. In part that risk is because there are no resources on how to do it other than ones I wrote (and some of those resources are lost to the winds of history), but in part it's asking people to pick up parts of the functionality that haven't been fully beta tested because nobody does this. And you have to be really really good at this to even figure out what's going wrong, much less figure out a fix or a workaround.
No, I don't know what it would take to fix this situation. I sort of doubt that it's worthwhile trying to change it at this point. My experience with Adobe is if you try to change their direction, even if it would benefit them to change, at best they'll ignore you.