You may have already spotted that I've taken the time to earn myself a couple of Macromedia certifications, namely Flash MX Designer, and Flash MX2004 Developer.
Flash banner from set produced 02/2007
Personally I find Flash quite enthralling; one of the reasons is that behind all the gloss lives a fully mature programming language, ActionScript.
The possibility of using Flash in combination with ActionScript means that not only can you use the drawing tools built into Flash to produce a ball, but you can also tell Flash to draw a ball with scripting commands.
A subtle difference perhaps, but speaking from experience, having attempted to learn a few Programming languages, sometimes it's just more fun to try to figure out why a particular line of code isn't working when it is coupled with the fact that a particular ball isn't bouncing as it should.
Not everyone shares my enthusiasm for Flash. Some of the old school, relics from the "Skip Intro" days, swear that Flash is only good for one thing, that being animation. They usually follow that up with something along the lines of "The Internet has too many moving images on it already", or "Show me something that Flash can do that JavaScript can't".
I can agree to some extent, but Flash is still omnipresent. Google, Yahoo! and YouTube, for example, all make use of Flash to deliver their video via the internet, making up, if I may mix my metaphors somewhat, the body of the iceberg.
OpenLaszlo is opening some interesting doors, as are the applications being developed with Flex. Both of those applications use the latest incarnation of Actionscript, version 3.0, as does the latest version of Flash, "Flash CS3".