Well in general I think AS can do everything besides easy frame-by-frame motion. You can use a tablet with AS but for me it doesn't feel or look much good.
Yes, you can do puppet animation in Toon Boom with pegs, it works, busy rigging a character in there now. I prefer AS' bones but then apparently TB has a good IK and I haven't tried that.
If you want to do frame-by-frame in AS, there are ways to do it with a switch layer and onion-skinning but I really don't think AS was geared towards that. For a start the way shapes are created in AS can get a bit finicky and for me almost impossible ifyou want to try and fill a shape you've just drawn freehand with a tablet. Also, the ends don't taper too well and the computer decides how to place the line once you've drawn it. You can't see the pen width as you draw, its a bit tricky moving frames around once you've drawn them, the onionskinning doesn't have any customizability, so its a little clunky.
However, in TB the drawing tools feel great, and as you know you can do good frame-by-frame work.
Yes, a lot of the YouTube videos made with AS look like they're moving in moon gravity, but there's a whole spectrum of work to see. I recommend checking out Grey Kid's work. They use bones in an informed manner and it looks great.
AS has some bone physics but if you're going to let the computer do all the work, you may not get the results you want.
For the views, yes, you can do different views, rig them all separately, and put them in switch layers.
There are ways to do tweening between the views but this gets a little complicated and time-consuming for me and I think is unnecessary and can even look worse than just having like, 5 views (front, 3/4, profile, back 3/4 and back).
Anyways, that's my blurb about it.
I keep harping on about AS' drawing tools because if the drawing tools were cool I'd totally dig to be able to draw stuff and move it around in AS. At the moment I'm drawing stuff in Photoshop and importing into AS. I did some vector work in AS but then its planning and drawing with a mouse and clicking and editing points, creating shapes and fills, which works if that's the look you want, and to be fair some people have created amazing vector work with AS' tools. I was just stoked to find that I could get a good natural feeling pen in TB.
I still use AS for work and use TB for frame-by-frame stuff. I like that AS is smallish and its pretty quick to get results.
I'm using a license of TB that will expire next month so I think I need to buckle down and get my own license. Not cheap, man. Grumble.
I'd say the only limitations to the software are the drawing tools, perhaps a separate set that created raster art would be great for a tablet, and then I guess you could use switch layers to do decent frame-by-frame stuff.
Apart from that its the person using the tool that will determine things. I've seen awesome AS work and I've seen not so awesome AS work.
Check this - 'Neo-Mickey' by Barry Baker:
http://vimeo.com/1500926
Its one of my favourite examples of AS.
Your best bet would be to probably download the AS demo and try it out for yourself. The actual program is around 10 MB but as of late Smith-Micro has stuffed it with so much bloatware that its now something like a 300+ mb download. You'll pretty quickly be able to judge for yourself what drawing with a tablet in AS feels like.
