You are expecting full resolution full frame rate previews from a compositing app and it's not going to happen with any of them unless you have a monster machine and a simple project.
Here's the normal workflow for something like a logo animation. Populate your composition with the elements you want to animate, arrange them in the Hero position (final or most important position). Go to the point in the timeline where you want the elements to end up and set keyframes for everything you are going to animate.
With the composition panel magnification factor (bottom left) set to something like 25 or 50% and the comp resolution set to Auto, move back in the timeline until you are at the point where you want the animation to start and move each element into their starting position. Drag through the timeline a couple of times to check the movement and then do a ram preview. This part I call a pencil test because it's like an animator making some sketches and seeing if the action will work.
Make any adjustments you need to make to the animation until you get the motion to look like you want it to look. Now start adding other elements to the scene like optical flairs, color correction, motion blur and check a couple of frames at full resolution and full size. Usually this is easiest to do if you have the Magnification factor set to Fit to 100% (200% if you have a HRez monitor) and then hitting the ~ key to make the Composition Panel full frame. I call this ink and paint like a cell animator, after the motion (blocking) look well the animation is sent to ink and paint to get the final drawings outlined in ink and painted.
After you get a little experience you'll find that you can set up an animation very quickly using the pencil test technique, then spend a few minutes on the polish, the ink and paint, then send it to render without ever running a full resolution full effects ram preview. That's what most folks do. Those that do like to run full effects previews usually do them with the magnification factor set to 50% and comp resolution set to Auto or Half.
That's just how it works in the VFX business. It has been that way for years. It's better than it ever has been, but we have quite a long way to go before a compositing and motion graphics app will run as smoothly as a Non Linear Editor.
Apple's Motion fools folks into thinking that motion graphics can be worked on in real time, and as long as you keep things simple it will work pretty well, but load it up with a bunch of effects and try and do something complicated and you'll run into slow downs in Motion too.
It's not a joke to think about using this software, you just have to learn how to use the tools in an efficient way. Thousands of professionals use AE every day for compositing and motion graphics. I know of hundreds of feature film opening credits that were created in After Effects. Any visual effect you have ever seen in any movie or commercial can be composited in After Effects. Yes any — you may have to do some work in a 3D app or use some 3rd party plug-ins, but AE is a really usable tool which is getting better with almost every new release.
The other options for visual effects out there are either limited in their toolset, expensive, or extremely difficult to learn how to use. I'm not saying AE is the best because I use a lot of other tools, but for many things AE is a plenty usable tool for creating composites and motion graphics that you cannot create in a Non Linear Editor. You just have to learn how to work with it.
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