After Effects CC 2019 Very Very Slow

Hi, I'm running a PC with i7 6 Core Processor and 64gb of RAM.

I have done very minimal editing in After Effects, nothing huge or crazy, just some simple 2D animations with a stationary camera, a spotlight, a background, and I'm using motion blur on the text/icon layers to animate them in and out using scale and position keyframe animations. The video I'm working on is less than two minutes long, but takes well over an hour to render for playback.

If I add any new keyframes, or move an existing keyframe, or drop a new icon on the timeline - really, if I do anything at all - the section that was edited takes another hour to re-render and playback. For example, I had a gear icon on the screen. I added a rotation keyframe on the gear icon and had it rotate over 30 seconds of the video. That section took 45 minutes just to process a simple rotation. I feel like this is a User error, because if I do that same animation in Premiere, it plays back instantly with no need to render. Plus, I self taught myself the Adobe suite, so I feel like I'm missing something obvious that I just don't know about because I'm self taught.

The timeline is never super busy, I've got maybe three icons on screen at a time with one line of text. I've set my RAM settings to allocate the maximum amount of RAM to After Effects, but even so, it never clocks over 7gb of RAM. I have 64GB. If it's rendering so slowly, why isn't it using more RAM to speed things up? It's got a lot of headroom. I read about multiprocessing, which is apparently no longer available in After Effects CC, but then I read about RenderFarm. I don't know if that plugin would help my playback issues or not. I feel like with an animation this simple, After Effects should have no problem playing it back.

There's a huge blank section of the video because I have the project linked to a Premiere sequence, and the blank section is where there are videos in premiere. But even that blank section takes godly ages to render, with absolutely nothing on the screen. Any help or suggestions would be seriously appreciated.