Shaun_Max It's probably not advised to use Animate as the IDE although you can still use it to make assets and export SWF's to use in openFL. The main problem with Animate as the IDE is the compiler, but beyond that, you lose proper code hinting. Haxe is a bit different from AS3, but there was almost no learning curve coming from an AS3 environments. A few gotcha's include using inline var's instead of constants, casting expressions as different types, embedding assets, and for loops. A lot of the differences are pretty easy to overcome though because they're so intuitive.
All in all, starling on haxe for native devices is way faster than starling on AIR hands down(for obvious reasons). The migration is relatively painless!!
The best IDE to use, in my opinion, is Haxe Develop. It's a little buggy(and crashes sometimes), but you cant beat it in terms of simplicity for workflow and publishing your projects.
Bink thanks for the thoughtful reply - this is pretty much where I'm at in terms of information about the subject as well. Hoping someone more experienced with both environments knows more, first hand. 🙂
I am also curious about performance comparisons on fallback to software rendering.