Adobe is hot garbage; After Effects is ridiculously janky.

Inexplicable when a render fails, hangs indefinitely, then inexplicable when the same render succeeds with nothing changed.

Have to babysit the machine all night,, the 'Render Queue' is useless now. 

Can't tell the Client the software is now garbage, just have to kvetch to other professionals and hope some other software company picks up on a great market opportunity.

Agreed. Absolute garbage. Days wasted for the blue bar of doom that either fails, results in faux-saves, etc... And AE ALWAYS doing an Auto-Save, RIGHT after you !. Just Saved or B. Export resulting in timeout and crashes. With AE, everything in threes. I've rebuilt projects at least multiple times. The Adobe Experts use a LOT of Marketplace and 3rd Party plugins, as well as Macros, which is frustrating. Basically, what it boils down to is the same troubleshooting step provided isnc ethe late-90s after something doesn't work. Start over. Adobe invests more into YOU finding and sharing your solution then they are. As an inudstry standard, working for a global communications company, Adobe just isn't cutting it anymore. Plagued with problems. It wasn't conforting when a staff of Adobe shared with me quite honestly that Adobe CC isn't meant for Enteprise Servers, despite what they adviertise. Our IT Department concurs. I've been trying to work in AE and I spend more time waiting for it to render a shape with 48 gigs of RAM allocated towards it. Adobe's suggestion, I need to downgrade to 8gigs of RAM. Or my other favorite, you need to buy this (Macbook), or this App works better in (iPad), and you should look into maybe a more powerful PC (I have Dell's power Beat and twice above recommended specs), and my last personal favorite, have you tried using AE on your iPhone (i use Android).

Would love to see a competitor software towards After Effects, especially when it comes to motion graphics, character animation and vectors.

There is BlackMagic Fusion and Affinity already. However, I don't believe in a Saint Company, which has the power to compete against Adobe and will do it a lot better. Have a look at Avid: crazy bugs, have a look at Microsoft: crazy bugs as well, have a look at Intel: massive hardware bugs, have a look at Apple: overpriced and also buggy as the others.

I work on a daily basis with Adobe software and most of the time, everything works just well. Yes, AE is slow, yes AI doesn't make any sense in a lot of ways, but once you figured out how to handle all of this and once you got an optimized computer, you hardly run into any issues.

Adobe should correct the hardware recommendations to realistic values and should make clear that learning their software is a process of years. I understand the disappointment, every time I see one of their marketing videos.

*Martin

As Mylenium say's adobe is still the leader in this kind of application or maybe the only company offer a full package of software can work all together in some way, some people thinking the developing is something very easy you can open your PC type a few lines of code and that's it few hours later you will have a new AE super hard and strong. this will never happen even the best company have a lot and lot of bugs and issue may you don't see that because you'r not intreating but believe me most company are almost same, the problem with adobe may they create applications can run on any type of PC with different spec to be available for any kind of users for student and Pro and this will generate a tones of issue definitely .

anyway macromedia was the first competitor of adobe and we all remember how adobe acquired it and they shutdown some macromedia applications so when you have extra money you can do a lot

One can imagine how, hopefully in the near future, an enterprising group of folks will capitalize on all of Adobe's many failings, and end up putting this sorry corporation out of business—through sheer good-ol' fashioned competition, excellence... market share... you know, capitalism.

Won't happen. Adobe are simply too big. At best you could hope that AE dies off quickly, but there's the rub: Competing companies have been around forever, but frankly Hitfilm and others simply don't seem "get" what makes AE so universally appealing to a specific demographic, despite its gigazillion bugs and quirks. Don't get me wrong: I'll be the first to admit that I despise the downward spiral AE took ever since CS6 and I would even agree that there are perhaps not the most talented people working on it (anymore), but at the same time I don't see how anything will change.

Mylenium