Flex was immensely powerful. Back in 2007 I was able to prototype a Flex app for a financial firm where I could load 20K complex records on UI super fast for various streaming views/Charts/trading views etc. All possible with AS3, BlazeDS/LCDS Java back-end; building trading/streaming applications was fast. Wish Adobe and rest of the guys supported Flash/Flex platform on Desktop at least. Moving to open-source/apache didnt help either; Apache Flex is pretty much written off. Sigh !