Re: Is this a usable animation method?

That's a good constructive point. Don't try to compare. Good enough, I'll start looking into expressions
more. I've already gotten a basic understanding of parenting, nulls, and puppet pins. All things that aren't in Flash but I instantly see a use for, so I'm adaptable to new working methods.

The first thing I did when I got a trial of Flash was to bring in a bunch of 300 dpi Photoshop characters and flew them around the screen. That bogged down quickly, and I learned Flash is not ideal for bitmap and learned the vector symbol approach quickly enough. Now I've got the latest Flash, with nice new features like bones to utilize, but being able to go back to the Photoshop images with Ae is the first order of business.

If you mean by "code in Flash" the action scripting level, I never really got into any of that. My goal has always been cartoon animations for video, and I've only used it to animate on the stage and export to quicktime. Similar goals with Ae, but I know how the results differ in appearance and that's the look I'll be going for. The simplest description would be like a more fluid Aqua Teen Huger Force look.