[derefr]

> This is not at all what Flash developers needed

I mean, the product was already Adobe Animate for years at that point — a tool for animators, not IxD developers; where the intended export product is a video raw to be fed into AfterEffects, and any ActionScript support only existed to do things like character rigging automation, mouth-flap sequencing, etc. In other words, for replay-time (⇒ render-time) computation, not for interaction.

The Animate runtime had essentially, at that point, evolved out of being a software runtime per se, and had become something rather more like a custom demoscene "demo" runtime — an abstract machine tuned for compactly representing instructions to procedurally generate a video+audio stream when executed. Something more closely related to mod-tracker abstract machines than to a thing like the JVM.

I'm not surprised that everyone else left; the product for IxD folks ceased to exist in 2016, when it was renamed. That it still kind of worked if you did this or that was a coincidence, not intentional.

I am surprised that the animators themselves then left. What made them leave? The whole product still works just fine (if not better) for their use-case.