One of the main functions of this site has always been to preach the good word of Flash to the uninformed (or misinformed) masses — it's why we created The ActionScript Jabberwocky and hosted the once annual ActionScript Poetry Contest. It's also why we created Flash games and spent months turning a long-in-the-tooth open-source text editor into a fairly great little ActionScript editor.

Over the years, we've had our differences with the makers of Flash (both Macromedia and Adobe), but we've never been shy of professing our love for their work in no uncertain terms.

So why so silent on the matter for the past few months?

Well, quite frankly, we're not feeling it any more.

Don't get me wrong, I still use Flash daily — sometimes still for fun, but most often for work, and there are some amazing things being done in the world of Flash, Flex and AIR these days. And thanks to a diverse client base and a plethora of cool projects, I'm quietly taking part in many of them every day.

But am I loving the platform? Quite frankly, no.

Thanks to a growing problem with bugs, inconsistencies with external interfaces and a general lack of faith in the player itself, Flash is starting to feel a lot like the HTML/Javascript fiasco that caused me to seek out Flash's "works anywhere" promise way back in the 1900s. These days, I seem to be debugging the player more than my own code.

Chris at FlexibleFactory, has a post today that sums up my own feelings toward the state of Flash pretty well. In fact, he inspired me to finally break my silence on the matter too. Anybody else want to chime in?