After Effects - the most stable release I ever had was CS3

My guy, the most stable release I ever had was CS3. worked like a charm, no memory leaks, fast as F1, and I could render 2K, minute long comps in minutes in a $400 high school computer lab.

Multi-frame rendering did reduce render times, and it scaled well with cores, which is why people loved it.... then they took it away... and several years later they gave it back... and it wasn't as scalable, and even puget benchmark had a note on that, under why they no longer recommend high core counts. https://www.pugetsystems.com/solutions/video-editing-workstations/adobe-after-effects/hardware-recommendations/

for those who don't want to follow a link:
"After Effects used to make great use of high core count systems (including dual Xeon) but starting with AE CC 2015 most tasks no longer benefit from having a high number of CPU cores. This is largely due to the fact that Adobe removed the “render multiple frames simultaneously” feature in part due to the fact that they are starting to integrate GPU acceleration. While it used to be that more cores = faster, since higher core count CPUs run at a lower speed a CPU with around 8 cores will be faster than a higher core count CPU or even a dual CPU setup. Multi-frame rendering brought some of this back, but from our test data it doesn’t scale well enough for a dual CPU workstation to give an advantage over a single, high core count CPU."

the regression is real, and I'm sorry, but my experiences mirror what Puget Systems experienced;
multi-frame rendering is hugely less scalable and efficient than the simultaneous rendering hack, and the fact that they removed the faster, scalable version, and took years to give us a far inferior version speaks volumes of the lack of care and interest in maintaining a market presence, or a useful tool.

so, really, you can "Nuh Uh, I'm different!" as much as you want, to as many users as you want, but it won't stop the fact that everyone, including companies who build benchmarking software and optimize workstations to run it faster... agrees the software runs like lukewarm tar.