Hi,
A lot of people have made claims about the future and what will happen to Flash but I sure don't know what's going to happen.
As an AS3 guy, it's bittersweet that Flash may eventually meet its demise but hey, life goes on
I think bulky sites, naughty banner ads left enough of a bad taste in peoples mouths that it gave Flash a bad name. There are some fantastic games and applications that have/are being made still in Flash. Look around and you'll see that people are even using it to make mobile apps now.
AS3 is a full featured language, so learning it won't hurt. I worked with Java before I found AS3 and it's a lot like that (object oriented c-family language). That and there's still a lot of businesses that use IE 8 and under (not fully HTML5 supported).
My advice: learn Javascript (the new C), a higher level language(Java, C++), and a scripting language(Php or something) and you'll be well rounded as a programmer.
Animation wise I can't say (as I don't do much animation). But I work with a LOT of Flash animators who will be reluctant to go to another environment. Espescially since they've been using Flash for 8 years or so. So maybe Adobe will finally make that 'Edge' thing work right to where it outputs HTML5 in an 'Adobe Friendly' environment.
That's my two cents, we'll see what others have to say about it. Good question though