Exactly. I use Flex + Mate on a daily basis building enterprise software and it's a pleasure to work with.

Forget rich UI, I'm talking about being able to build a beautiful, consistent, responsive, and fast web application using 2 developers. The same app in HTML/JS would take a football team of developers and wouldn't even come close.

Yes, there are things that suck about Flex as with everything else in the world, but for what you can achieve with it, there really isn't anything that compares. :)