Trust me, it's definitely worth persevering with. I'd advise anyone just starting out to begin with Flash 5 if possible. Not only is AS1.0 easier to wrap your head around that AS2.0 but the design screen is less cluttered.
If you're an artist/designer, then Flash is tailor-made for you. There's no reason why you can't use Flash to do quick vector-based images, rather than some of the more traditional drawing packages, and they can always be exported as gif's for web use. I find there are things I can draw in Flash much easier than in Coreldraw for instance. Instead of messing about with nodes, I find it more intuitive to use the shape principle employed by Flash. And there's no reason why you should need to touch AS at all if you want to produce simple animations.

Sent you some reference material that might be useful.