I'm going to introduce you to a class that will save your life in terms of animation...first off, forget the built-in Tween class because it's terrible compared to this option. It's called Tweener and you can get it for AS2 & AS3. You can set all tween properties (x, y, alpha, rotation, etc.) in one function call and you can specify easing functions to apply to the MC AND the time and even a delay before executing like you referred to. You can also specify what should happen during certain events pertaining to your animation, such as when it starts, when it ends, etc.

PHP Code:
Tweener.addTween(some_mc, {x: 50, y: 100, alpha: 0.5, time: 3, delay: 5, transition: "Strong.easeIn", onComplete: myFunction}); 
or you can create an Object that holds all those props and pass that to "addTween", like this:

PHP Code:
var tweenProps:Object = new Object();
//add some props to tweenProps
//...
Tweener.addTween(some_mc, tweenProps); 
And since I'm feeling so nice today, I'm going to refer you to the BulkLoader class which can control the loading of multiple MC's, FLV's, mp3's, etc. in one easy, concise package!

Here are the links:

http://code.google.com/p/tweener/

and...

http://code.google.com/p/bulk-loader/

and TweenLite is like Tweener, same stuff basically, but maybe you'll like it better...I use Tweener cause I'm used to it.

http://blog.greensock.com/licensing/