Givin' Up Food for Funk

There are some other tradeoffs to consider in the department of native tools:

Motion paths

Director veterans will love the dotted-line visualization of motion paths:

This gives you an idea of how an object is animated. For some reason when you see the dots closer together at the top of an arc, you can interpret this as a realistic phenomenon of physics. Just one of those brain things.

And how cool is this:

This is a context menu on a keyframe in the "Position" attribute layer. You can choose how you want the tweening to move around that keyframe. You have some tweening options in Flash 4, but they are buried so deep in the program that it is easier to just draw a guide layer. In LM you can change the path characteristic with one click and immediately visualize the change. Cool.

Bezier Tool:

Maybe you are one of the people who likes to use the path tools in Photoshop when you paste your friend's face into unlikely photos. Maybe you like 50's-Americana-Roadside-Diner-Style filigree (1). Maybe you haven't discovered the wonderful magic of our friend Mr. Bezier. Whatever the case, this tool is handy to have. What's even handier is is having it right in your .swf authoring environment.

Soul Power '74 - Time Changes Everything
Live Motion - Super Bad
Gimme Sum Mo