Harmony is fantastic for seeing the bare bones of the animation process and putting it in action. It’s incredibly easy to play back movement and export information.

This program has proven its value. It she assign mouth shapes. It is a strong full production option for 2D art.

Unlike After Effects and Flash, Harmony was designed not just with character animators in mind, but specifically character animators working on serial projects, who will need to reuse assets over and over again. It's the ultimate vector animation software package (though, yes, the newest versions do include raster brushes). The color process is infinitely better than Flash and Photoshop. You can create palettes for scenes and the color filled areas are linked to those palettes. Update the palette, and every instance of that color is also updated. This saves a massive amount of time (vs. animating in Photoshop using AnimDessin and AnimCouleur extensions). Harmony is also accessible to learn in a self-guided context -- the training material on the Toon Boom website is deep, and well written. If you're new to Harmony, you can learn the basics in about a month of working through the material.