When I discovered Flash I was a literal child (12 years old), so it's not like I was reading license agreements regardless, but even if I were an adult, I could still enjoy the software simply because it's fun to use.
I certainly don't have many nice things to say about Adobe as a company, I hate that they moved to a subscription model, and I hate that they didn't open source Flash Player, guaranteeing an expiration date on the tech, but that really doesn't detract from how much I really enjoyed using the software.
They could sell me Photoshop version 2024, and I could pay them $600, and just use that for the next 20 years. Instead, I'm being sold Photoshop: cloud edition for $50/month, for forever. I don't actually own my copy of Photoshop that I'm giving them money for, I'm renting it from them.
Photoshop is Adobe's product, so they get to charge for it however they please, but that's textbook rent-seeking. You could argue that they're improving Photoshop and deserve the rent, but what if I don't want those new features and I'm happy with Photoshop 2024, but regardless of that, I'm still only renting Photoshop (and the rest of the suite) from them these days.
Textbook rent-seeking is convincing a government official to make it law that people use your service. Rent-seeking isn't "charging rent" or "charging a subscription".
When I was in college, my roommate (also a music student) and I would scream about how frustrated we were with Finale for notating out music.
Reading the [review and seeing GIF examples][1] of the workflow of Dorico music notation software made my jaw drop as a college student. I still want to brag to other people at work about the things I can do with it (and believe me, they do not care).
There's other software that delights me from time to time, but I've been using Dorico for probably five years now (took awhile after it came out for it to be ready for my day-to-day use) and I still can't believe music notation software can be this good.
There's a few causes I'd posit. We've gone through a number of tools now, and they all seem finite. We don't have time to just noodle around anymore. We have loads of other things to play with as well. And of course, life, obligations, etc; time is a rare commodity and you want to spend it on something you know you'll enjoy.
That said, last time I spent some time on just playing with software was with the Pico-8 virtual console and its intentionally constrained development tooling.
I will admit that Pico 8 is probably the most fun dev environment I've found since Flash. It doesn't give me the same "anything is possible" feeling Flash did, but that might just be because I'm more jaded and not a child anymore (as my quickly receding hairline keeps reminding me of!).
I do think that Flash was more fun for me just because it was "animation-first", instead of "programming first". It felt like I could easily make "real" cartoons, and then make a game out of it, instead of trying to bolt on a bunch of PNGs into a gaming framework. I know it wasn't for everyone, but for a kid like me, it was kind of magic.
Tangent, but was the difference between Shockwave, Flash and Shockwave Flash?
I remember that Shockwave came first and Flash followed. I also remember how the HDD would thrash whenever a website called on the Macromedia plug-in to be loaded. It would thrash with that, and with Java!