WHile I hate Flash, and think it has one of the worst design metaphors out there, it is the defacto standard for interactive on the web, and there are some things that you can do in Flash that cannot be easily done any other way...for instance:
http://www.theyrule.net
We are working with flash to do interactive db stuff...unfortunatley it is the easiest way to prototype and get the functionality we want. Thinkmap has possibilities though...
COldFusion? Good gawd man, use a real middleware system. PHP/MySQL is the only way to fly...