Turns out they have 'Flash CS4' Flash Professional out now, but, after reading into it in detail, it seems that, well, they didn't fix a whole lot. (Surprise! You just wasted 700 USD!) However, they did add some 3D mathematics into the engine, so it can do manual 3D (doing the matrices for modelview and projection yourself using their Matrix and Vector classes). Not sure how useful that'll be, since it is flash and therefore slow. Also, they did add a interesting DrawTriangles, which should let me add in models and stuff, but the speed is highly in question as is matrixPalette or other deformation techniques.
Also, it seems, that from Flash 4, more than 10 years later, onto Flash 10, THEY STILL HAVEN'T FIXED SHAPE TWEENING!!! Gawd.
So if you use flash and want to make decent looking swallowing animations, rather than being able to control the bezier control points and such to make a decent animation (as you would in 3D) you have to:
For example, if you are tweening a drawing of a face as it changes expression, you can use a shape hint to mark each eye. Then, instead of the face becoming an amorphous tangle while the shape change takes place, each eye remains recognizable and changes separately during the shift. ...You can use up to 26 shape hints. ...Shape hints work best if you place them in counterclockwise order beginning at the top-left corner of the shape.
I struggled with this problem for years (no pun intended) and ultimately, it became way too much of a workload for the benefit. It can be done on complex shapes, but the insane amount of shape hints required makes the idea of using flash for this purpose extremely unattractive.
If you have found any tricks to make flash behave like a normal vector editing program, post em here. Or hell, post all your new flash tricks here.
I'm very interested to test out this triangles function to see just what it can do. I did the same with GameMaker a while back, and hated it a lot. So we'll see what flash does.
Peace ya'll.
-Z