AE 15.0.1 broken Quicktime support?

H.264 is not the worst possible production codec, but it is close to the worst. H.264 support in Quicktime was dropped by Apple because an MP4 container is a better option, it never worked as well as it should in a QT container, and Apple discontinued development. It was actually a good business decision. H.264 in an MP4 is probably the most universally used format for distribution and it is probably the most cross-platform and device format we have now. The problem with rendering h.264 with the Output Module in AE is that the AE rendering pipeline processes one frame at a time because that's the most efficient way to process frame based production formats. You cannot and never have been able to do multi-pass rendering with the Output Module (via the render cue). That's why Adobe introduced the Adobe Media Encoder. Dedicated software designed to render compressed output for distribution. It's all a matter of using the right tools.

Any specific reason for dropping the H.264 codecs? Myself and others at my studio are a little confused by the change and it appears to be a little hostile to the casual AE user base. We use Media Encoder often in our pipeline, but feel stripping the ability to export in these codecs straight from AE are a little excessive and adds another step to our review process, which to work properly needs an H.264.