Animate Extensions- Options to Develop

Hi there, I'm in the process of developing some Animate addons. My current workflow is creating a panel within an FLA, with each button calling an actionscript function which in turn calls a JSFL function.  To be perfectly honest, due to the lack of debugging support it's painful and so slow.

I'd like to switch to a more professional environment, so what's the recommended way to develop addons like you'd see on Adobe Exchange? I'm assuming C++?

Any help would be appreciated!

Thanks!