The thing I never understood was why Flash Player continues to be a binary blob. They don't even sell it for money. Just BSD license the damn thing and inside of a few months it will be on the standards track and people will have incorporated the code into all the major browsers and be fixing all the bugs for you.
Popular image file formats are open standards and people still buy Photoshop. Popular video codecs are open standards and people still buy Premier. Why they decided to go with a binary blob for ActionScript and in so doing make everyone hate them is a mystery.
The flash IDE is great for vector graphics , animation ,and game assets.
AIR is great , but there is a lot of untaped potential , and Adobe doesnt seem to be interested in making that product grow.
Adobe could run it's player on a js vm, but does Adobe want to now ?
Adobe is relaunching a new version of Director , that would make it a unity competitor.(i'm one a beta tester of the next director).