Oops, I forgot to answer your question. I surprisingly found AE quite easy to pick up. I did Flash action scripting many years ago, so the concept of key frames etc. I was familiar with and managed to get to grips with.

Most of the time came from trying to understand the template I bought. The designed had gone deep with multiple embedded templates within each other to get the animations to work, so I had to unravel some of them where I wanted to change the images or paths. I am sure I was hack handed at a lot of it, but it gave me the results.