Steal a feature from AE

I'm looking for some workflow advice.  Here's my experience and I'm writting this as I'm open to change he way I work.  I've been using Premire for a few years now, primarily to create bespoke animations for big clients here in the UK, NHS, OFGEM etc.   I know I should probably be using AE, as it's feature packed, but I really don't need ANY of those features. I'm just moving predrawn PNG's / Animated GIFs etc.  I have used AE for several projects, but in all of them it felt slow to create, with Premire being much more intuitive, plus I can organise effectively so it remains uncluttered. In AE it's just oodles of layers, which when expanded is scroll, scroll, scrool and an overload visually.   In AE I can't seem to achieve that quick "flow-state" feel when creating, manipulation objects as I do in Premiere.   With what we create, the only thing which is "lacking" in premiere is the ability to assign and lock an object to a parent layer, so when I move the parent layer the object remains in position (on the parent layer), and they move together.  I know I could nest, but we often build anmation foregrounds and backgrounds as long image files, so we can parallax scroll.  When you nest layers, it crops all the image layers.  If I could have AE's parent child feature and null object (I use to ground objects in a scene and utilisae as a pseudo-camera) in Premiere it would be totally perfect.  Any advice gratefully received.