Guys, Macromedia is not losing sight of what made Flash popular.
Media content, games, 3D engines, particle engines.. and so on - they will all benefit from the advancements in AS3. Not only the speed, but the new model makes much better sense.
In other words, things before developers were frustrated about (such as... how about taking a MovieClip from one parent and attaching it on another parent? Can't do this in AS 1/2) are simple and natural in AS3.
Some comments were about AS2/3 changes only slightly the syntax and logic remains... Not exactly. This is what AS1/2 transition was, but AS3 is a totally different beast. AS3 does NOT compile down to AS1.
AS3 is still having MovieClip, timelines, frames, labels and all stuff we love in Flash. Also it's still easy to script on, even though it's stricter, it's still just a script - not harder than JavaScript to work on, and since AS3 is a newer iteration of ECMAScript, it's even a lot better than JavaScript.
But the AS3 model was changed to adapt to what people use it for. This is games, media sites, applications - Macromedia saw how people use Flash, saw what the community wanted and redesigned the virtual machine so Flash can do better what it's actually used about.
If the AS3 model was the same as the AS1/2 model then many of the benefits we're so eager to get wouldn't exist in first place. The new model is a benefit itself.
Porting from the old engine to the new might be hard to easy - sometimes will require logic changes, but mostly nothing critical that would require you to start from scratch.
Also if you have clean AS2 code instead of AS1 code, porting will be more easy since AS3 uses similar class syntax.
My advice: just get familiar with AS2 before trying AS3 and it'll make more sense. AS3 is a long time away from us, and even after AS3, AS2 is still fully supported and powerful platform you can do amazing stuff on. Just since AS3 is a lot better than AS2 doesn't make AS2 suddenly unable to do all cool stuff you see on the internet right now :)
Regards, Stan Vassilev
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