It's basically Flash, it just exports differently. Same program, different name to avoid confusion with the Flash platform. Basically the only thing that's going away for the typical Animate user is the swf, everything else will remain as Animate exports to html5 and js while using as3.
I'm an artist working directly on a team with software developers instead of being an actual developer, but if your offer is open I would love to talk investing since who knows how long I'll be lucky enough to have this gig.
Sometimes it's just easier to do a quick search and modify the result instead of keeping a huge texture library available constantly. But keeping an inventory of scratch/bump maps to use on a variety of projects is actually something I've been looking into...then wham, here it is. Anybody have experience with it?