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Well at least, something is happening in the world of AIR. 
What I don't understand is: what becomes of Flash Builder? Will it also become a Harman product? And Animate?
In our mobile development team (and out there as well), AIR is clearly not trending.
But when a cross-platform project requires Windows / desktop, AIR is still the best option we have, it seems, since all other frameworks do not seem to offer mature & reliable solutions.
^ That's what I said, basically. The workflow of visual design to app is a huge value for non-hardcore / new users. What I proposed for starters was more like creating a simple integrated visual editor for Stage3D / Starling / maybe Feathers. That way you would both gain control over the whole ecosystem over time (taking over from Animate) + would gain interest from new developers quickly. You could advertise this Harman IDE + AIR as a new product (even rebranding it, if needed). That would also give additional justification for your pricing models.
You would be able to import bitmaps (texture) which would auto merge into atlases(shouldn't be hard, lots of 3rd party open source spritesheet tools around). You'd have simplified scene with Starling MovieClips and timeline implementation with the ability to animate just basic properties at first (scale / rotation / translate / alpha etc.). That might constitute a basis of an AS3 engine which would handle loading scenes and their resources & the timeline animations (so people don't simply have to write that boilerplate code). You could use this to build up basic app scenes and even UI rapidly / publish to mobile and desktop right away.
Lastly, you would be able to double click and attach scripts to MovieClips. You could do it like Unity, give users option to integrate with their favorite 3rd party AS3 editor.
Myself I've been implementing such workflow in the past (but for HTML5/JS), creating simple apps from Adobe Photoshop. So I know its doable reasonably quickly by 1 person, let alone by a small team.
The important part is having the complete workflow for AS3/Stage3D/AIR(no matter how basic) where you can already build simple apps - then you could market it from a central website hub, going mainstream from there. I think if you won't do that and simply dig around AIR runtime for a year trying to leak the holes, you will simply become more and more obsolote compared to Unity 2D and others (because now Animate and AIR basically became broken apart, which makes it even weirder). You need to solidify the ecosystem, get interest of lots of new non-hardcore developers and get them on the paying programs. At least, thats what I would do 
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As for bending Flash into using GPU, thats what Adobe has been trying to do...it kind of works already. I think, problem managing textures automatically is a tricky business. Uploading textures to GPU takes a long time. And its really hard to determine when to do that, and in what amount, without hampering the user experience (causing lags by texture upload in the middle of something).
You might need some new AS3 commands to help AIR managing texture memory. Not saying its impossisble, I'm only speaking with experience developing on chromium for mobile for a bit, which works similarly. It didn't feature GPU acceleration at first, then yes, but you needed to sue some css "tricks" for the accelerated layer. But of course texture management becomes a pain as soon as you start using it more extensively. You needed to arrange things in particular order or use various funny css switches to avoid lags caused by texture uploads at random times. I'd probably prefer to have that specialized Starling workflow with atlases rather than black box doing whatever with the textures.
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