Trouble with morphing a text font to another

This goes way beyond defining first vertices. Your whole workflow appears inadequate. For this sort of thing you cannot rely on automatically converted text contours or traced masks or whatever it is you are using. You have to clean up the contours in Illustrator in the first place and check the integrity of the paths there. And that's pretty much all there is to say about the matter. You have to put in the work in AI and only then import or copy & paste your stuff into AE. You can't fix in AE what was not right in the first place. Well, you can, but only the hard way as you already found out. You might also consider @Rick Gerard's favorite trick of creating a blend in AI, expanding it and copy & pasting the inbetween steps as keyframes into AE for a smoother sequence. In any case, at least 70 % of the solution relates to prepping your work in Illustrator, regardless of what approach you take.

Mylenium