sure, its hard at the beginning, but as you grow and advance through development you start to build up a library. Most of the features missing "or changed" in AS3 can be replicated using your own custom classes. And when you do so, you learn more about what is going on.

In saying all this, if Adobe can keep towards OOP standards whilst still keeping speed execution the same and provide support for these "easy" methods then I don't have a problem. I have a problem when the performance of the player is sacrificed so someone can rest easy that all their dirty references placed all over the place can be cleaned up using 1 line of code. That's what gets me frustrated.