If all you want to do is simple 2.5 D animations the place to start is planning or picking the images you want to use. Even with outside software solutions or 3rd party plug-ins, the right image characters are the most important part of the process. I seldom do this kind of work, but a long time ago I did a piece for a museum in conjunction with a couple of dozen other AE artists using photos from WWII and we all just separated background, middle ground, and foreground elements in Photoshop, imported the Layered PSD files, arranged them in 3D space, scaled up the layers farthest from the camera to put the photo back together, then animated simple camera moves. Each image was a separate comp and the resulting shots were edited in an NLE.
The hardest part of the process is filling in the holes when you cut out something from the background. That's why image selection is the most important part of the process.
I can't give you any advice on either of those products. The only thing I can tell you is that more of your images are going to cause problems and take longer to process than you expect so if this is contract work, be very careful about what you promise. The WWII project I talked about took about a dozen artists about 3 months to produce a 10-minute film. We were all volunteers and none of us worked full time on the project but I can tell you that I spend more than twice the time on the project than I expected to. Most of the extra time came from falling in love with images that were difficult to prepare. Most of the extra time was spent in Photoshop.
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