Coming back to sprite animation help

I've decided to give sprite animation a try again I have all the old Resources like sprite database, v-cam, flash8 and more but this is all stuff from 6 years ago. What has changed? Any new programs to use?

I'm particularly interested in the 2d sprites on 3d backgrounds I see on "Deathbattles" and other youtube animators these days.

Has the sprite animation community literally not changed in 6 years? is there really no new programs or techniques to use??

well theres the newest version of flash called animate CC, its good but stupid expensive. I'd say only get it if you think the new features and less lag(note I said less lag not lag free) are worth it.

as for techniques, well I'm trying to find a use for the envelop tool, seems good for whip like objects, haven't yet found any other uses.

Well tbh the sprite animation community kinda died a lot over the years. There's a few places you can still find sprite animators such as here (well mainly on our discord), deviantart, other forums like Maplemation and Nexgensprites, and maybe a few on Youtube/Newgrounds.

There's a lot of people who still stick to using Flash 8/CS3. I've been trying Adobe Animate myself and I think it's pretty nice. A few people actually use After Effects. The really crazy ones completely use After Effects to create animations but most people just use After Effects for it's 3D stuff so they can make their animations 2.5D or create some different effects and do a bit of video editing. A lot of the times it's a bit overkill but I've seen good animators use it to much success.

Other than that the only thing I can think of is that people mainly convert their SWFs to video format using Swivel so which flash version you use is pretty much not important these days. Other than that I think everything else is pretty much teh same