From a business stand point, the best place to be is under a paying contract no matter the platform. The landscape will always change and we have to be prepared for the possibility of flashes death.
Despite some bad news I've heard on the grapevine, flash is an unmatched joy to develop in. Of course I've yet to tear into Unity which I think is where I'd rather be. I recently put together a simple web app in js and it went way over budget, past the deadline and had to sacrifice a lot of design and layout in terms of cross-browser consistency. Multiple browser support contributed to most of the delays/hurdles.
Our current project started out spec'd for js and had to switch to flash simply due to the need to support IE6.
It kinda sucks because if your work through this http://ejohn.org/apps/learn/ you'll really appreciate what js brings to the table but clients that support it (browsers) ruin it.
Adobe is a lucrative company, but they act like their last dollar is on the table. Heavily fractured teams who don't communicate, lots of valuable dev cycles wasted on producing crap like Flex (sorry Gerbick, it sucks). Core employees leaving to start great products like Corona. A step towards unifying their app's UI's went sideways fast.
They need to just take a deep breath, do in depth research (like Apple does) before committing to a new direction and eat the cost of some top tier project managers.
One void I hope they fill before Apple does is a killer-app html/js/css authoring tool. Yes we hate generated code but we hate hacking multiple browsers even more. I firmly believe a visual editor can be built that generates clean markup and valid cross-browser css. It's time.
I'm also confident in AS3's future, but feel that .swf's might be the least compiled format.
P. S.
My boss wrote AS3's Hype. He's not sure how to feel about the name getting ripped considering they are vastly different in purpose.
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