Files From a Few Months Ago Now Look Different (washed out)

Reading your updates, I can feel your frustration and there's not much I can offer (you, another AE only specialist here).  

Is there a solution in this thread is marked as solved: https://community.adobe.com/t5/after-effects/color-change-illustrator-to-after-effects/m-p/10443877

If you are forced to change all your illustrator files, can you batch the process, like with actions in Photoshop?  Can Photoshop be used as a middle man to convert the colour profile, if not?  If you can't do either of these, there are tools which can emulate mouse click, seeing as you're this far, it might be worth investigating,

Is there anything on AEScripts that can help?

Sorry, these are probably all things you've looked at, but it's all I can think of.

Just updating. Almost two months of this issue, over 45 hours with Adobe customer service taking over my computer, deleting my preferences and plugins and apps. ZERO help so far. Calls from my escalated case and adobe specialists come in at 2:30am or any other random time you can think of. The AE specialists say it is an AI issue and transfers me. The AI specialists say it is AE and transfers me back. No one can help or solve the issue and it is so frustrating to waste so much time. AE specialists say they do no know how to use AI and vice versa.

After many more hours with Adobe customer support, and adobe confirming the issue and replicating it on their computers I am told the solution is:

-Color settings in Adobe illustrator must be set to "Emulate Adobe Illustrator 6" in order for files to work properly in After Effects.

-Creative Cloud applications can not be synchronized for consistent color or the color will be inconsistent.

-I am also told to go back and reopen and change color settings in all my years worth of source files. Then, reimport them into my AE project files (the problem is not solved if you simply resave them with new settings or edit the original from with in AE).

Does this make any sense to anyone? It is a bit of a nightmare to me.

AE worked fine with all the art I have created for the last few years, but now all the source files can't be used.

Update: Not exactly a solution but I downgraded to After Effects 17.1.4 and everything is back to normal. All my projects display and render properly.

This may be an Illustrator issue. There's a bug that randomly chnages colors when documents are saved with hardware acceleration enabled and the PDF content is generated. Re-opening your files in AI and saving them as a nerw file, then replacing the sources may already fix things. Of course check the usual stuff as well - hardware acceleration, color profiles and so on.

Mylenium