Indeed. Expressiveness has not been a big focus in the past. We'd like to change that with Firefox. What kinds of tools would you like to see for solving visual design problems?
1. CPU utilization will get better. We have a lot of low-hanging fruit yet to harvest (eg. the playerglobal built-ins aren't JIT'ed yet as we dogfood the interpreter.)
2. Facebook games running Flash are still a huge % of crashers for all Flash-enabled browsers. We'd like to help that. As browsers like Chrome sandbox away Flash's ability to be faster than the browser (i.e no more direct GPU access on Pepper) then Shumway becomes much more attractive, especially on mobile platforms for which there is no Flash Player.
3. SWF as a packaging format for app store deployment is a pale shadow of what we set out to do when we started working on it years ago. SWF could still outlive us all (like JPEG, HTML etc.) Shumway may well be the best bet to keep it alive.