if you want to use illustator with the 3d extruder make sure you it expand appearance in your settings before saving it out. This will break it apart into vector paths. This may help.
yes you can,
do not use motion blur or 3d space, simply work in 2d as you would in flash this will output a smaller size swf. Flash can take awhile to import a .swf when you are outputing from AE from my experience.