Ok, for starters: Flex is cool. Its simple and has a very sophisticated structure. It is flexible, allows teambased projects and forces Actionscripters to do things right and neat.
The Flash IDE, in contrast, has evolved from a mix of a Shape-based design-tool (like Illustrator) and a timeline-based Authoring-Tool that allows you to build nice-looking animations or even little programs/games combining disgustingly ugly code and head-killing Movieclip-clockworks that never really worked as they should.
Later Coding-Tools like Flashdevelop started to introduce Flashers into the world of proper Software-Engineering by supporting the OO-syntax of AS2. But despite all efforts: Flash remained a "beginners"-programming language that most "real" programmers always kinda smiled at.
But then little Frameworks and class-libraries popped out of the ground like mushrooms: Tweeners, Game-, 3D-, Vector-, Emitter- and Tile-Engines, Soundclasses like Popforge, Object-Serializers, Webservice- and Chat-Protocol-Supporting classes, MVC-Frameworks and so on.
Just one little things was missing, something that can do all that patterns you are working to get something set up and finished in combination with a nicely built clean and well documented Framework.
And finally I found it: GAIA. Nothing more to say, just watch the Video. Flex is good when design is not a question. AIR is good, when you don't care about the fact that only a tiny minority has installed and will install its runtime.
GAIA can be a perfect shortcut for all Flash-Beginners but also Professionals to set up and maintain projects with ease in FAR less time.
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