Flash for desktop applications(Zinc VS AIR VS SWF Studio)

Most people automatically think of AIR when they want to develop some cind of desktop application using Flash.
In my opinion Air isn't all that useful, it barely lets you do anything that your normal Flash player wouldn't let you do. I do not deny that it is useful in some cases, but if you want to do some stuff that are just a tad more interesting than your average code (for example reading and writing to Windows registry), it is not a very good choice.
So here's the path I took. At the company I work we develop Desktop applications using Flash. These applications need to be able to take user input while they are in full screen, need to read the path towards the the default application associated with a file type, etc.
So my first impulse was to use the flash player component (ActiveX) to make a self written projector witch can communicate with my swf files using FSCommand, FlashVars and FlashCalls, this actually worked, but we began having issues since the new FlashPlayer 10.
Since neither me or any of my coworkers did not find the solution for the problems we where experiencing, we decided that we should use some commercial products. We had a very large list of functions we needed from the projector, and very little(if any) space for compromise.
The first product we found was mdm Zinc, seemed to have everything we needed or an alternative path to get to the same places. We tried Zinc out, converted the source of the project we where working on to use Zinc instead of using our own projector. The conversion process was quite painful, and tedious, some functions worked as we needed them to, as they where described in the documentation of Zinc, other did't work as intended, or didn't work at all. Finlay after about 5 day, all our code was converted to use Zinc. Our product consisted out of aprox. 10 swf files, 1 swf file, loading the other 9 based on user interaction(only 1 at a time). We tested each file while we where converting it, but only tested the project as a whole after all the bits and pieces where ready. After being overwhelmed by the functionality offered by Zinc, we finally started testing our project as a whole, and it was a major disappointment, not only we found that our applications uses considerably more resources (thus making animations look horrible), we also found that it crashes randomly.
We then had 2 choices: 1. Find another product 2. Keep using our own projector. After a little more searching we found Northcode SWF Studio, so hoping that this time we will have more luck we tried it out. The conversion of the source code was much faster, as all functions worked as intended, and we found the offline documentation to be more helpful, we also noticed a drastic decrease of resources relative to the same project made with Zinc.
I do not want to seem like a sales agent for Northcode, but i like to deal in facts: Air doesn't give you half of the functionality you need for a serous application, Zinc has serious stability issues, and thanks to Northcode SWF Studio our bugcount went down by aprox 60%.