Alternatives to After Effects / That sinking feeling

In the end, applications are tools and you should use the one you feel most comfortable with and know how to use in a more productive way. To be able to define which application is convenient for you, you must go through several and then with experience you define which is your main one and you have others as an alternative. I join Rick and Oussk's comments because After Effects is not perfect (no application is, in fact nothing is) but it has many yesterdays and knowing how to adjust it in the best way will give you many satisfactions throughout your journey as a post-producer .

For me, after effects is the most powerful tool for motion graphics, maybe yes you can find some more stable tools but I prefer AE because there is a loot of resources especially in terms of expression and script, another solution you can try apple motion with final cut pro, but you should use mac in this case. 

To be completely honest, I always have auto-updates turned off. I also routinely roll back one or more builds using the Creative Cloud app if I have problems. I also keep all available builds of AE, Premiere Pro, AME, Audition, Photoshop, and Illustrator. That almost always saves headaches. Before I do an OS update I clone my boot drive so I can roll back to a previous version of my OS in a matter of minutes instead of hours. 

As far as alternatives to After Effects, I will be honest here too. For some kinds of effects and some kind of tracking, and some kind of visual effects and compositing, I use Davinci. For some of my 3D work I use Blender (http://blender.org), for some I use C4D, but for most of the visual effects work I do I use After Effects because I have a lot more tools for AE and for some things, AE just does a lot better job in a lot less time. The right tool for the job depends entirely on what you are trying to do. Trying to create one type of cartoon-style animation in After Effects is a nightmare compared with creating the same kind of animation using Character Animator. Change the style slightly and After Effects is a very reasonable tool. Change the style again and you are going to be much better off with Blender or C4D. For a lot of my 3D work, I use Element 3D from Video Copilot, for other work I use C4D Lite, for other kinds of 3D work I use Blender, and occasionally I will jump into C4D. Again, it all depends on the job.

As far as Dynamic Link goes, here are a few facts you should consider because of the limitations of the current releases. 

• A dynamically linked comp in Premiere Pro will always take longer to render than it would to render that same comp to a suitable DI using a production format like ProRez or DNxHR and drop that rendered comp into the Premiere Pro sequence
• You should never include more than one shot (clip) in a Premiere Pro sequence when you Create an After Effects Comp from selected unless you have to make a transition between those shots that you cannot make in Premiere Pro because you are wasting render time
• Dynamic Link from Premiere Pro always opens a copy of After Effects in the background and background to render the shot and Background Rendering may not fully utilize GPU accelerated effects and could lead to color management issues

If my AE comp will not render for a ram preview at full resolution at the rate of several frames per second I always render the comp using the Render Queue. Always. I routinely have composites that take more than 10 or 15 seconds a frame to render and those comps could easily take three or four times as long to render if they were dynamically linked back to Premiere Pro. 

I hope some of these suggestions help. After Effects, if properly managed, can be a very good and efficient tool, but if you expect it to do everything well, you are going to be as disappointed as you would be if you tried to build a bookshelf and all you had was a screwdriver.