Okay, let me put this another way: it appears that I can load an SWF and then instantiate each symbol in that SWF, and then load each symbol to the 'stage' (or whatever it's called in Flex) separately.
I can certainly instantiate each symbol separately, and then align it on stage, but it seems to me to be bass-ackward to do it that way, expecially since I created the original SWF with everything in position. Is there no way to access the attributes of the individual symbols within an SWF without separately instantiating them?