I've always been quite proud of my ability to acquire at least a moderate mastery of most software (I can use both vi and emacs!), but I never managed this with AfterEffects. I don't know what it was, but I always seemed to end up in some interminable state that I could never get back out of without quitting the whole damn thing, or I could never make the timeline behave itself (I never had this problem with Flash), or... it was just endless misery for me.

I very much admire people who are adept with it, and sometimes when I watch the opening sequences in films, or certain types of adverts on television, I can even imagine how they might have achieved it with AE - but for me it was a great relief when I never had to use the damn thing again.

(I spent about a year maintaining a proprietary ActionScript library that would render AfterEffects animations - not dissimilar to Lottie, in fact, except almost certainly a whole lot worse, especially the bits I wrote given that there are probably some horses who understand AE better than I did.)

After Effects isn't a video manipulation tool. Video manipulation is one of its capabilities, it is also capable of motion graphics and animating vector shapes. This library works off the vector shape side of after effects.

Yes, it's been built towards motion graphics. Just as Photoshop has been geared towards web design over the years.

It was originally a post processing tool. Hence the name. After Effects.

Which is why this whole thing seems so similar to me.

I see what ya mean! Its always felt like some weird mix of illustrator and photoshop to me. Strange to how PHOTOshop moved the graphic way and the lightroom became the defacto photo editor. Guess that's just software evolution for ya :)

I've had good luck with videocopilot.net, though it's more centered on vfx than motion graphics.

If anything it reminds me of flash.

It's a player for vector-based scriptable animations after all.