I was really let down when Adobe After Effects removed the ability to randomize "effect groups" (for lack of a better name, basically a group of layered effects that creates a single, easily recognizable effect, such as "grainy movie film").

I spent so many hours playing with that thing. Don't get me wrong, I still do, but now I have to make all those tweaks manually instead of rolling the dice and hoping for a gem. Sadly, I don't find nearly as many gems as I used to when I was able to roll the dice.

I haven't used AE myself, but I use many of the other Adobe products and I know that many (perhaps all or close to all) of them have scripting support, so I decided to do a quick Google search for AE scripting guides.

A couple of results came up, one is an official PDF about scripting AE CS6, the other a website about AE scripting. I assume most of the stuff from the AE CS6 PDF applies to AE CC as well.

https://blogs.adobe.com/wp-content/blogs.dir/48/files/2012/0...

https://docs.aenhancers.com

From the PDF:

> When you use Adobe After Effects, you create projects, compositions, and render queue items along with all of the elements that they contain: footage, images, solids, layers, masks, effects, and properties. Each of these items, in scripting terms, is an object. This guide describes the ExtendScript objects that have been defined for After Effects projects.

I think it might be worthwhile to look into whether scripting might be used in order to randomize effects and effect parameters. My immediate guess would be that yes it would be possible. I didn't look into it closely, and if it turns out to be a dead end then I apologise for that but anyways I figured I might mention this in case it might be useful to you. Also, of course since I didn't look into it closely I can not make any guesses as to how much work it would take to get the type of functionality that you want.

Lightroom v6 is still available as Lightroom Classic. Lightroom CC was a rewrite, and they are definitely playing catch up.