Is there a way to seek compensation for non-functional software?

Please send the reports if you can repro or see it again. We don't know about the crashes you may be experiencing without them. There have been some issues related to PSDs fixed in some recent updates to AE, but hard to know exactly if that's what you were seeing. There has been some instability with various NVIDIA drivers as well, which was my first thought on the issues you were seeing.

As to Media Encoder, if it's not responding to AE, a reboot will normally fix that. That said, if you are exporting to H.264, then definitely use the Render Queue in AE. 

I do recall hitting "don't send" a number of times, you're free to check my email and see if any did go through. I've never  had confirmation that anything ever happens with error reports so I often just don't bother. When a popup comes up that says "send megacorp more info?" I just click no - hahaha you can forgive my lack of faith in Adobe / Corporations in the year 2023.

I ended up rebuilding the file entirely from scratch. This time I avoided using any .PSD layers and it resulted in zero crashes from that point forward - in the end it could have simply been too much burden on the system, or a bug to do with PSD files, but I wouldn't think that a few layers all derived from the same PSD would cause that much trouble.

Another issue came up when I tried to Render with Adobe Media Encoder from After effects and that also simply just did not work as advertised. After a few hours I saw people in other threads saying that it just doesn't work with After Effects even though it shows up in the menu, and that I just needed to use the AE Render Queue instead, which is what I did. Anyway, I ran out of time. I lost the job on Sunday and likely the client as well. Hopefully not. Time will tell.

I could open the old file and wait for it to crash and send that through if you want an error report. Looking into Fusion and Resolve as suggested for this kind of work in the future and might just stick to PS / AI / ID on the adobe side.

When AE does crash, are you sending the reports in associated to your email? I'd like to be able to look up the crashes to see what's going on so we can help get you back on track. 

Just move on to greener pastures. Fusion and Resolve do most of what AE and Premiere do, just without the hassle. Not what you want to hear, I know...

Mylenium