A lot of people are down on Flash several reasons - search engine issues, screen reader issues, load time issues, "don't waste my time with an intro movie or splash screen" issues and they are all valid reasons not to overdo Flash.

Artistic ability is not a requirement to use Flash although it doesn't hurt. Flash Video is very popular now - you'll see it on the front pages of both the Amazon and Microsoft sites these days - and it requires no drawing talent. It's very effective as a piece of a website in most cases or in the entire website as in George Harrison's Site for example.

Flash requires scripting - from very simple to fairly complex - but only for certain tasks. You can do Flash video or stream mp3s with almost no scripting at all. I say get the 30 day free trial and go for it.

I plan not to over do flash, as per another post, the main content of my site will be flash free. I agree that nothing is as maddening as WAITING for a page to load then getting the announcement about downloading flash 8. Some people can't or don't want to download things on their computer. It also depend on how bad I want to see a page if I will wait for it to download.

 But I have been thinking maybe it might be nice to add it to a few places just to dress it up a bit. I am thinking I can add it, without much of a slow down or interruption to my page in general.

Also I am a bit of a control freak, I don't want to put any codes on my page that I don't understand. So learning flash is now on my list of things to do.