[annywhey]

To be fair, it became possible to do deeper graphical optimizations in Flash later in its lifespan(particularly after the BitmapData API, and towards the very end, Stage3D) but I would agree that it wasn't in the spirit of the tool to work on Flash games with an eye towards high framerates, that just happened as a byproduct of the web-game space professionalizing around the close of the last decade.

It really was an odd, "software is brutal" history in that in a very short timeframe Flash progressed from being the domain of hobbyist game makers, animators and web site designers into the core client technology of every web site using audio and video. And then a few years after that, it was cut off from expanding to mobile and was strangled on the web through expansion of HTML.