I asked the same question about a year ago ... and got more or less the same answer. I tried to figure out a way to integrate flash and hal - and I think there is a way, but it would involve writing scripting hal to send commands to the flash program ... which is possible (there are other applications that do similar things) but I didn't have the time to deal with it.
I moved on to Verbot, which doesn't allow flash but does have a pretty powerful character editor (wish the Conversive Character Studio worked with Hal ... that would rock) ... but the verbot brain editor isn't as nice ... everything has its tradeoffs. I've gotten bored with Verbots (and its more or less not being developed anymore ... the company that makes verbots is focusing on its enterprise software that is not available to normal people ... or if it is it would be to expensive for us to buy.)
I wouldn't hold my breath on Ogre being integrated into Hal ... as noted, I asked your question a year ago and was told Ogre was being integrated into hal... and just read that the integration has been postponed until the next version ... so who knows ... could be years.