oh, by the way, I didn't like the line "... constants don't do what you think they do" Please be more specific.
And in a 4000 line OO environment, I think, they exactly do what I expect them to do. OK, you can check ming SWF library, and maybe see my point of view.
http://ming.sourceforge.net
The constants are used as "FLAGS". This is very neat in my opinion. And one should have way to manage these flags. That's all I'm asking.