Alchemy also required a per-domain license key to be purchased to unlock various API combinations at runtime. For me this was the biggest shock and definitively a hint that not all was well in flash land. Runtime player licenses were unheard of until then - only the authoring tools cost money. Having to pay up for every swf on every domain certainly put a chilling effect on experimentation around the new APIs.
As far as I can remember, that reversal came much much later, when flash was already "dead in the water", unfortunately. By that time WebGL and asm.js/WebAssembly was already coming on to the scene. And it really set the stage for questioning adobe's stewardship of the runtime for developers. Fool me once, ...
