Interface is Slow and Laggy

Strongly recommend looking at Notch (notch.one) a realtime graphics engine for motion graphics - it's heavily used in all the big live shows but can also be used for offline rendering. They've also got a massive upgrade coming out soon. Notch is aimed at designers far more than unreal which a sledgehammer cracking a nut for most motion graphics tasks and has a workflow that doesn't encourage experimentation.

As an example of how backwards AE is, you  you render your scene from notch at very high res, let's say 8k (I have worked on live shows at even higher reses than that, up to 24k wide!) and it'll do it in pretty much near realtime...

Then you bring it into AE to do a few tweaks (nothing hardcore) and try to render it out again, and laugh as the estimate tells you 5 hours. I mean...it's would be hilarious if it wasn't so infuriating.

Actually one of the 24k scenes I did took 6 DAYS to render from AE

I did briefly experience the glory of a smooth Adobe interface, but it was only when I borrowed my friends M2 MacBook Air. I don't see why a 2080ti and a 24 core processor can't move a key frame smoothly, when every other app I use (mainly blender/resolve) can move 100s of keys or most of the interface at 60+fps. My computer is only 2 years old and still near top of the line until pcie-5 becomes a thing. 

 @jenkmeister1961936 any progress on getting Windows to run @60+fps? I think I saw you mentioned you had an m.2 machine running at around 90fps for the interface. Please give us parity on the windows workstations! I have noticed some small gains but still a ton of jank across the board on many layered comps. 

@Warren Heaton10841144 

I'm able to deliver creative on a daily basis too, but I wouldn't call the experience good.

@nubnubbud 

Yes, After Effects is used heavily in motion graphics for broadcast television, having replaced Henry, Paint Box, Combustion, Flint, and Flame.  You described what is called "playout" for live tv and VizRT is used for that.  I think you'd like VizRT, it makes strong use of high-end NVIDIA graphic hardware.  VizRT even has a plugin to load After Effects projects, but I think most operators prefer pre-rendered animations.

If you have the time to take another look, I think you'll find that best practices for workflow, system specifications, and use cases are discussed quite a bit in these forums (by me and others) as well as the help documentation.

I'm sorry to hear that you are having a difficult time.  Have you thought about pivoting to something similar that makes use of your skillset?  There are some things I miss about my freelance days, but having to purchase my own high-end hardware and license software and third-party plugins for it is not one of them.  While After Effects is a must-know for junior and senior broadcast motion design jobs, it's the number one hard skill that post-production employers are looking for followed by Premiere Pro, and Photoshop.

@nubbyninja 

RE: 
If Adobe wants to keep us aboard, or bring us back, addressing their software with UX oriented around identifying "the lag" and letting us perform analysis through profiling so we can quickly and easily identify what aspect of our AE "editor" is causing problems. 

Have you had a chance to use Safe Mode and the Effect Manager yet?  These just came out of beta with After Effects version 23.4.

@nubnubbud I feel what you said. I feel it in my soul. 
And I can say that, even with bleeding-edge hardware, AE's performance and stability issues persist. 
I've gone from i5960 to i6950x for CPUs and I've gone from dual and even triple (on SLI) EVGA (rip) 1080ti FTWs with 64gb of DDR3 to a Threadripper 3990x with 256gb of DDR4 @3200 Mhz with a 2080ti FTW3 to an Aorus 3090 extreme waterforce. But even with my new AMD 7950x and 4090 with 64gb of DDR5 @6000 Mhz I STILL run into crashy, laggy projects with random crashy issues with stock fonts on a fresh Windows 10 or 11 install. 

For the longest time I thought it was just me, I thought I was the one to blame for misconfiguring something. I'm a long-time AE lover, and I've been using Adobe products since before they were Adobe products.... and I can say with absolute certainty that software as a service has not improved my own experience. CS3 to CS6 I loved the crap out of Dreamweaver, Photoshop, the list goes on. 

I do enjoy SOME of the improvements involving multi-threaded rendering and previews, things that should have been worked out years prior. Almost everyone I know has been avoiding Adobe software for years, and I'm the only holdout. 

Sadly, I think I'll be moving on to greener pastures before long, since I've learned how to replicate almost every effect I could make in AE in other software, much of it being freeware. 

If Adobe wants to keep us aboard, or bring us back, addressing their software with UX oriented around identifying "the lag" and letting us perform analysis through profiling so we can quickly and easily identify what aspect of our AE "editor" is causing problems. 

A great place to start would be drawing inspiration from Unity's profiler which analyzes the whole execution stack at runtime, allowing a developer to quickly draw down on things hampering performance and strategize ways to counter and prevent drops in perf. 

Hopefully shaking the trees here will knock something loose. 

@Warren Heaton10841144 well for one, you keep saying "I can do this just fine" but never have I heard you post any of your specs, machines, workflows, or use cases beyond "I do broadcast", which is a very odd use case for After Effects. if it's live TV, after effects would surely be absolutely terrible, and if it's daily, it can't be more than pulling a basic key with a background or you're looking at 8 hours just to render a 22-44 minute clip for a daily program. a minute or two easily exceeds half an hour of rendering if you do anything beyond a color correciton and a mask.

but as for your question...

I paid for a program that works as described, and I did not get it.
I'm tired of spending more and getting less.
I'm tired of being told my computer was what got worse when the program updated.
I'm tired of devs deciding that my favorite output format "is out of date" then adding it in again half a decade later.
I'm tired of performance "increases" that just take the performance and push it somewhere else.
I'm tired of ever increasing system requirements that make me pay for better hardware, so adobe doesn't have to pay for proper development.
I'm tired of hearing how overstressed, understaffed, and abused the team is, while their company makes record profits.

I'm tired. I'm so, so tired... of not owning the tools I use to feed myself, and I resent that I'm supposed to be thankful for the privelage to do so.

@nubnubbud 

While issues come up now and again with After Effects and my feature request list is farily long, I'm able to delivery content for broadcast television daily using After Effects, Photoshop, and Illustrator as well as a good selection of third party plugins.  If it's not working as well as for someone else as it is for me, I'm happy to compare notes.

Nubmubbud, what else would you like to see in addition to members of the After Effects team offering to personally open a project that is presenting unexpected issues for a user?

@Fresh Squeezed Creative also! a while back you asked me about Nuke! it's pretty great! The noncommercial version's biggest hurdles, are they don't tell you about where they crippled it, so you might suddenly find a useful node doesn't work or certain features are missing. Mistly, though, it has feature parity with After effects, and a much greater ability to make template files for certain effects. Best of all, it'll output minutes of 4k footage with dozens of effects in under a minute on a 7 year old budget system! nice! the only thing lacking is quality tutorials. it's expensive enough that it scares away the enthusiast or hobbyist types that make tutorials.

@Rob217717683hsl I think they're in denial at some point. people like warren seem to be coping, and the adobe employees probably have, like a gag order or NDA and they're like
"don't worry, we see your concerns and helpimstuckinabugfactory we'll adress them soon"