When it comes to ActionScript the problem isn't so much creatives trying to write code (they'll do stuff in the score) but more self taught programmers who may not be that experienced. Although you could level the same charge at other languages like PHP that attract production people who are looking to do more cut-and-paste than anything else. Another issue is that Flash projects can be very client driven, and more often than not advertising clients don't always grok tech issues.
Although I feel that Adobe has to take some credit for the structure and evolution of Flash. Adobe has always been more about adding 50 average features to sell a software suite than to focus on better/faster/stable. Unlike Microsoft who owns the OS or Apple who makes hardware their core business is selling new tools, so there is no "bigger picture". The result is bloatware.
Most Adobe software is bloated (Creative Suite and Acrobat, in particular), but I don't think it is fair to call Flash bloated. The Macromedia Flash dev team has always been very conscious about Flash's download size, allocating code size budgets for new features.
Here are the historical file sizes of the Flash Player installer (compressed .exe for Windows ActiveX Control):
* Flash Player 2 (1997) = 0.2 MB *
* Flash Player 3 (1998) = 0.2 MB *
* Flash Player 4 (1999) = 0.3 MB **
* Flash Player 5 (2000) = 0.3 MB **
* Flash Player 6 (2002) = 0.5 MB ***
* Flash Player 7 (2003) = 0.6 MB ***
* Flash Player 8 (2005) = 0.8 MB ****
* Flash Player 9 (2006) = 1.5 MB ******** (first Flash release after Adobe acquired Macromedia)
* Flash Player 10 (2008) = 1.9 MB **********
* Flash Player 10.1 (2010) = 2.7 MB **************
* Flash Player 10.2 (2011) = 2.7 MB **************
* Flash Player 10.3 (2011) = 2.9 MB ***************
By bloated I mean interface complexity rather than physical size. Once upon a time Adobe really understood interface design, but these days their apps feel like a total mess to me. The point of every upgrade seems to be to add a stray feature and move some buttons around. And then they have to make programs like bridge that talk to other programs.
And then the programs keep asking to be updated every five minutes like a kitty that's hungry. In fact I'm looking at my CS3 icons vs my CS5 icons in my dock and even the new icons looked bloated. In fact even the ordering process of upgrading CS is bloated —- it was as if I had to read a manual to figure what the differences were and what the upgrade cost. And I say this as someone who has used their software since Photoshop 1.0 and grew up in PageMaker (which to be fair was Aldus).
And did I mention that it took me longer to install the CS suite than to upgrade to Windows 7??? And I didn't even install all every package (and it still put code from some of those programs on my harddrive).
Although I feel that Adobe has to take some credit for the structure and evolution of Flash. Adobe has always been more about adding 50 average features to sell a software suite than to focus on better/faster/stable. Unlike Microsoft who owns the OS or Apple who makes hardware their core business is selling new tools, so there is no "bigger picture". The result is bloatware.