Like many others, I was frustrated when AS3 came out. I thought that AS3 pointlessly did away with a lot of simple functionality, like adding commands to a button or loading .swfs into an external clip. I almost walked away from the application.

Then I got my head around the display list by reading online resources and a few books. Then three Flash projects dropped in my lap. The end result? For the first project, I utilized the AS3 display list a little but used more old skool AS2 tricks. For the second one, I used a more AS3 concepts than AS2 ones. For the third one, I went all AS3 and created a fairly complicated Flash movie in five days. It was made up of seven .swfs, each one of them containing one frame and one frame only. No timeline tweens, just class-based animation. Now, I'm thinking about what my next project will be and am planning for it to rely on XML. And, FYI, if you learn the display list, then XML is easier than it was in AS2.

There are still things that I need to get my head around, like packages and public & private functions (FYI, can anyone point me to a good step-by-step tutorial on this?). But I believe that if one learns some key concepts like the display list and the Tween class, then AS3 is, in many ways, easier than AS2.

I've seen a lot of past threads complaining about AS3 so I'm just wondering what the status quo is now.