I never curse on HN, but screw you, man. Nothing in my programming life has felt the way making animations and scripting them felt with Flash. You either missed out, or got suckered by steve jobs into thinking it's bad. It was overused, sure, but that's true of every new technology that's accessible and powerful.
Building something in Flash visually felt far more concrete and rewarding vs having to write lines of code for CSS keyframes or SVG animations.
Flash also just made it possible for non-programmers to build cool stuff. Today, that is pretty much impossible if you're not a programmer.
Programmers often aren't artists, so when they're playing around, they build something that may only be of interest to them. Taking HN as an example, I have seen tons of posts about people excitedly describing their favourite static site generator. Not much there for others to really dig into and enjoy.
And that's what we lose when the tools of creation are limited to those whose interests lie entirely elsewhere.
