Seriously why did adobe made putting a background image to controls so much harder between flex 3 and flex 4?

In flex3 most of the components have a backgroundImage property.



And you are done.

In Flex 4 you have have to either write tons of code to create a custom skin and do something like :



or use backgroundImage property with Embed as in :



Which I don't want because that makes the swf bigger and requires me to recompile the swf everytime an art asset is updated.

The only work around I found is this :

height="50">
"images/background.png" percentWidth="100" percentHeight="100" maintainAspectRatio="false">
"middle" percentWidth="100" percentHeight="100" paddingLeft="10" paddingRight="10">

"32" height="32">



"32" height="32">








This code loads an external image and puts it in the background of the buttons without fucking the layout.

Am I missing something here? Looks like flex 4 making things more complicated, I don't understand what people are talking about when they say it's making skinning easier, basically you have to create a new skin file with tons of code for each component you want to skin.