Indeed. It's as if Flash is an addictive drug, and we are coming up with ways to ween ourselves off of it.
Right now, I see the biggest benefit of Flash being that I can purchase a number of IDE's and create some multimedia (or games) for the web in no time.
I started it when I was in sixth grade, some four years ago and it hasn't changed much in the past two years. Understandably, it's not nearly feature complete. It's actually pretty interesting that when I started out, the goal was to have Flash as the output, because embedding HTML just seemed so impractical.