Flash makes me pull out my hair

I've tried a demo of Flash 5 way back when, and now I just downloaded Flash MX 2004 to take a peek at what's new. On the surface, it's still the most counterintuitive program I've used. You have strokes (lines) that aren't attached to the object itself, the arrow tool does too many things at once - try to hilight multiple objects and you end up 'splicing' them into subobjects; I can't seem to put anything into a Window control, my buttons only end up on the main form; there are multiple modes and types of components - shapes, symbols, instances. It seems unlikely that anyone can learn Flash just by playing around with it. I've learned programming concepts that were easier to learn, such as continuations and monads.