A great deal of why anyone still cares about Flash is the huge amount of amateur animations & games that were made with it.

Much (most?) of that was made with pirated copies. Is there a way to use Animate for free?

I doubt Flash would have been half as prominent, nor that we'd care about it half as much today as we still do, if they'd had some kind of perfect, flawless DRM on it.

CC apps are still pirateable AFAIK, but it's nowhere near as easy as, say, Flash 8 was.

> A lot of people subscribe to Creative Cloud and have access to animate.

Back in the Newgrounds days the number of people creating content who would have had legit access to Flash and Photoshop was... not high.

CC users were not the people creating content with Flash, tbh.