In my experience, AS3 take up does seem rather patchy. Many Actionscript enthusiasts began their migration as soon as the beta was released, but not many jack-of-all-trades freelancers or smaller agencies have even now. I don’t think the “fault” lies with AS3 particularly, as the most involved concepts in AS3 (class inheritance, casting, namespaces etc.) were introduced, in syntax at least, with AS2. I don’t recall as much of a fuss about AS2 migration, probably because it was was an opt-in affair and could be safely ignored by developers that weren’t interested. Migrating from AS2 to AS3 is not that big a deal. There are challenges, but they are more about the new tools and the specifics of some of the APIs.

A relevant question that doesn’t get asked much is what version of Actionscript are users migrating from? It wouldn’t surprise me that a significant proportion of the Flash user base is having to migrate not from AS2 but from AS1 (or some kind of hybrid) to AS3. That’s a much bigger leap to make, because it requires a grasp of the OOP paradigm. Until it clicks, learning the OOP ropes is more crippling than empowering, and satisfying a whining compiler can be an exercise in frustration.

Flash product evangelists like Lee Brimelow are working hard to promote AS3 to ‘traditional’, design-led Flash users, but even they don’t recommend the editor in the Flash IDE and suggest moving to a specialist coding IDE instead. Unfortunately, it’s in coding environments like Flex Builder that the casual user will be exposed to the requirements of the strict-mode compiler. This leads to the unlikely proposition that “Actionscript is for designers! (… who use Flex Builder)”. All in all, the Flash Platform embodies a confusing spectrum of tools, approaches and goals. The question is whether that is the mark of a crisis, or a maturing flexibility.