Awesome to hear that you were able to rescue your work!
4.5GB file size? Yeah, I assume that's due to all the bitmaps. You might also have been animating without setting up symbols, which repeats bitmaps all over the place.
I've done similar 2d animation work in Blender, and while it may take slightly more time to set it up in the beginning, throughout the process the viewport remains responsive and smooth, and scrubbing the timeline provides in a realtime feedback. Even rendering such animations is far quicker to complete than a SWF preview in Flash/Animate.
So although it initially takes less time to set up the warping of images, while animating and previewing you lose no time at all and in the end it takes 10 times more time to animate the same sequence in AA compared to a 3d app.
And not even considering the much wider range of visualization possibilities (lighting, true 3d camera, compositing, and so on) when using something like Blender, of course. (ps there are addons for Blender that assist in this 2d setup process.) And of course Blender does full 2d animation nowadays as well.
Of course, it depends on the final intent and content of the animation project which animation tool is the best for a particular job.
A core issue with Animate CC is that movie clips do not play in real-time while scrubbing the timeline. But that can be solved by using graphic symbols for animation work. Still, AA often slows down to a crawl even with relatively simple stuff that previewing becomes a necessity and that slows down the animation process considerably and also prevents an animator to remain in 'the flow'. Personally that really is one of my main reasons for staying away from AA. Aside from the fact that AA is also quite buggy and half-baked (the best performing version remains CS6 by far).
In short, as you have experienced yourself now: all of that mess exponentially slows down doing actual animation work. It's often wiser to invest a bit more time at the beginning in establishing a solid, fast and efficient workflow & pipeline rather than barging in, hoping for the best, and waiting hours for animation previews to finish and fix technical problems. Spending a day or two on prep and recon will often save SO much time and frustration during production time...
PS Before you completely commit to After Effects do some tests with heavy files. After Effects often needs to render previews as well, and real-time scrubbing of the timeline may not be an option at times. For 2d character animation work also check out DUIK for After Effects.
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