I remember Flash under Macromedia... I also started disabling it after I found out that you could access the local file system through some hacks. Actually had to do this for storing state on a project (around 2002 iirc).
I agree that it's great for 2-d animation, one of the best tools around, and why it's still used for education/training. Flex/Flash Builder also wasn't bad at all, and AS3, while verbose was interesting. Having XML as a first class citizen at the time was nice, and paired really well with VB.Net on the server, where XML is also first class.
There are a couple Flash players in JS... I do hope that Adobe opens the format up so a lot of the stuff made in flash can be preserved... the content itself was so much smaller than video files, and the interactions are much harder to setup and match using JS alone. I'm actually a little sad when I see converted flash animations to video (youtube) only because the originals were significantly smaller, without all the noise compared to video.
When Adobe bought Macromedia, my hope at the time was that the output format would evolve into straight, browser runnable JS, vector, movie and audio assets in a zip file with a manifest. So that the actual container format could be built into and supported by browsers directly. Where Adobe could concentrate on the tooling, which is where they made their money anyway.
The funny thing is, I thought Silverlight was FAR closer to what I'd wanted Flash to be, but there was just no way it would take hold, as the tooling was nothing close to Flash.