Yeah, all that was generated during the workflow of bringing artwork into Flash Catalyst from Illustrator. A lot of what you see in there is “duplicate code” for graphics used by Illustrator to interpret the graphics and render them (I think). You could literally delete a bunch of the MXML at the bottom of the file and the file would work fine in Flex, but then Illustrator couldn’t open it (I think). There may be a lot of ways the code that Catalyst generates will be optimized in the future, so we’ll see.

As far as pros and cons go, I wonder if in many cases you won’t even need to look at the skin MXML files, kind of like the way you would get PNGs or a SWC from a designer. The benefit over the PNGs and SWCs though is that you can go in and edit them and they aren’t static. On the other side, it can be a lot of code to wade through to find what you want. I experienced this during the presentation. With all the generic ids I couldn’t find the exact chunk of MXML I wanted to swap out. Then again, I was rushing

I’m withholding any hard judgements with the understanding that this is an early beta release of a 1.0 release of a “whole new” application. That said, I look forward to seeing how concerns like yours are addressed.

Juan