Good point. Have to say myself that i have a half decent understanding of what goes on under the hood but nothing compared to the knowledge i expect guys like Andre have so they should certainly be at the forefront of any talks.

Though there is certainly nothing wrong with any average coder mentioning things they find very difficult in as3 that they found easy in as1 and as2. This fits in with what youre saying kris as its those very people we are likely to lose from the scene because AS has lost that pickup and go friendliness which was its main attraction. I know plenty around here have noticed a drop in good new developers coming through and the way the language works now certainly has something to do with that.

I found the transition from as2 to as3 took me a good few weeks and this was largely down to how many errors i would get before i was able to find my feet. In many ways this is good as it forces people to be better coders but there are so many times when i have to take the long way around for no other reason than as3 considers it good practice to do so. It wouldnt be half as bad if as3 error reports were better in certain situations. It has improved immensely since flash 5 days but there are times when i could do with a bit more info than just 'something in your function is null and we killed your program, btw we know what the object is but were not going to tell you, good luck lolz). Why not let me in on what is null? If not how about a line number? Would be a lot nicer than having to put in endless traces in my code just to narrow it down to the area the null call is occuring.

Im sure there are countless more people could come up with. I wont even get started on arrays but its not fun looking for a missed comma or bracket in big arrays for say level maps when im almost certain a check could be done on compile to say 'hey heres a closed bracket, theres another element after this but no comma, maybe i should mention that', instead of coming up with completely unrelated error reports that send me all round the houses.

In short error reports could do with improving and the ability to handle movieclips at runtime with ease like you used to be able to do as kris mentioned