The new approach to setting depths in AS3 sucks.

Am I missing something. Or is the new approach to setting depths in AS3 far inferior to the old AS2 way?

With the old way, you could specify an absolute depth. This enabled the creation of a sort of depth tree that you could reference to see exactly where every layer was in relation to the other layers - like this:

With AS3, depthing is relative. It's not trivial to "sandwich" a layer in between two layers that already exist. I like AS3 - but the new depthing is a step backward.