Rainbow Dash is in flash ;) (or to put it another way: the wildly popular gen 4 of My Little Pony, with a substantial adult audience, began as a TV series authored in Flash for its animation, and AFAIK still authors most shots in it)

Vectors are scalable, you see… if you're good with an art style using puppeted animation in vector graphics (which can be much quicker and still look good and move well!) then Flash is right there, able to be used, flexible to any screen size you like. Lines made with Bezier curves are appealing to the eye, and the rendering is super clean (when it's not glitching out, see the MLP cyclops horse glitch)

I've spent hours poking around on the web seeing if there were ways to render Flash clips to, say, SVG: simply because I know Natron exists, is a WAY more powerful compositor but much like Shake (and presumably Nuke, out of my pay grade) can composite numbered image frames, including SVG. That means you can zoom and scale SVG-based clips infinitely without losing clarity.

(I'm aware of Fusion and just learned of 'free Nuke' doing a lastminute google check on this stuff, but I favor Natron because it's not restricted to noncommercial/hobbyist purposes and as it's a opensource option, it should be possible to keep a working version of it indefinitely so long as there's been at least one working version on your system. The big commercial software projects, I always worry they will forced upgrade you out of what you use)

…and the point is, you can create animations in Flash. It's a pretty damn mature technology, familiar to many, has a whole infrastructure around efficient use of it, and to replicate that in something like Natron from scratch ain't gonna happen.

Even people talking about reimplementing Flash in open form seem to be talking mostly about playback or web, not authoring.

Flash already exists and mostly works. It even exists in non-subscription form and runs on older machines.

...and use timelines and logic to sequence the animations, and combine them. You can do quite a bit of programming with out "writing code".

"Won't someone think of the children's market" is a very good reason to not kill software. So long a market exists there is money to be made from it.

By now it's more like "What will the people who used to be children think?"