This is not the place to point out the hows of the application in question (there's a forum on the site now for that) however a sad fact is that most people associate Flash with ads while associating related technologies such as SVG with true innovation. While flash is mainly used for advertisements, this has little relevance to the actual capabilities of the platform. Once SVG becomes dominant then it too will be used mainly for ads (and pr0n, obviously) but with the added feature of not being able to turn it off as it will be too integrated with the content of the viewed page.
SWF, the format, supports the creation of small-footprint vector images, dynamic vector images, a powerful platform programming language capable of communicating with browser components and extensive server connectivity mechanisms.
So what the advantages of an XML representation of such a format? Because yes, there is a learning curve. In short, SWF creation, editing, recovery, version control, compression, asset extraction and management, internationalisation, localisation, mapping, charting, conversion, format translation... These are the advantages the SVG community have been screaming about for years and may only become obvious when SVG truly hits the desktop. The flexibility of an open representation of any document format enables uses previously unimagined.