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).
Here are the historical file sizes of the Flash Player installer (compressed .exe for Windows ActiveX Control):