I loved reading your story.
This is were I wish and strive to be and funnily enough your life sounds about exactly the way I hope mine can be some day.
I think I might even use your article as a reference in future because oddly enough a lot of people don't seem to quite get what I'm talking about when I try to tell them what me dream is. "What, not have a job? How? What would you do? You have to work" etc. etc.
I agree. There is no wrong way but Flash galleries for the most part annoy me to. They're useless for the most part because mostly they can be implemented without Flash anyway.
But you do still see a lot of flash galleries on professional photography sites. Having talked to quite a few photographers I think most of them want to have Flash websites because "that's what everyone else does" ergo it must be right/cool. Some have claimed they want Flash galleries because of copyright issues, that images can't be saved directly from Flash sites. I guess they've never heard of print screen/screen grabbers.
The thing that really got me about this site though was how right down at the bottom they claimed "This page was made on a Mac using Adobe Flash but you probably won't notice". And they're right. I didn't really notice until I saw that text. Which is cool I guess. But it also explains why I couldn't ctrl+click to open links in new tabs or copy text off the page. You know, those kind of minor behaviors that have become standard in browsers and people have come to expect.