I'd love to be able to paste raster graphics directly into AE. It should just make a new footage element and save it to disk. There are so many cases where you need to bring in a ref image, a screenshot, something from an email, a style guide, etc.
Having to launch photoshop, create a new file, paste it in, go through the PITA photoshop save dialogs, say you want to save it locally and not on adobe cloud, navigate to the file, import it, then add it to your comp is a lot of steps/insanity that should be automated.
I think it's an insteresting idea, but Photoshop's expected workflow is a bit different. A photoshop file holds all the data embedded inside the file itself. Any clipboard pasted data becomes rasterized data in uncompressed fashion. For a single image file this isn't that bad, but AE's project file is ideally only referencing to other files and should only hold further information about what operations were done in the project. If actual image data is also stored in that file the whole ideology kinda breaks imo. Users will never expect image data to not exist on disk as a separate file when working with After Effects. And depending on what you store, the .aep file could get really large.
What could work perhaps is a mechanism that allows clipboard pasting but in a process that would also save the file to disk into a folder that could be specified per project. Such system would allow you to define in what file format and bit depth to save. But even this is not ideal imo. It removes the process of naming the image making it's content/intent ambigous unless viewed in context.
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