kitkats

I just name everything 01-, 02- etc if Alphabetical sorting of the native name is not good enough. One thing I would like is if AE continued to recognise the Solids folder after it was renamed for that reason.  If you name it 08-Solids then new solids end up creating a new Solids folder etc etc

Will this library of versions also be available to those subscribing to individual applications? Eg if I do nothing now and then pay for one month in 2016 will I be able to download every version of AE released between now and then?

The OP never mentioned global outsourcing, he talked about the glut of kids willing to be exploited.  These are two different issues. Unionising or legislation might help with the latter, but economics would surely restore balance to an unsustainable situation like that eventually anyway.  Increased international competition is bound to increase, of course - in 50-100 years time China and India could be the global super powers and the US could be akin to European countries today, a spent power.  If you're a westerner you probably don't want that to happen; but this is the global, liberal, market-driven world we live in.  All you can do is work hard, have principles, be nice and vote.  What is the alternative, exactly?

There's a script somewhere that splits your comp into tiles, you could use that and then stitch them back together in PS

 

Using code is difficult in any program. Nobody is being forced to learn expressions if he doesn't want to. That is completely missing the point. AE's expressions are so terrible because all the helpful extras are missing. The classic case is when it tells you that there was an error on line XX and then you end up copy&pasting your code to a text editor with line numbers just to find it. and of course several limitations in AE and the language itself like there being no simple way to test if something really exists or what layer/ item type it is and then you always end up writing complex conditionals based on finding names of layers and property streams. I could go on and on about this. You just need to download some of my free projects to get an idea how difficult it might be to debug some of that stuff under those conditions. Also a major concern is the terrible performance because it really is just a script interpreter and AE tip-toes through every line of code one step at a time....

 

Mylenium

This was my beef, too. Whether it's code or node isn't so much the issue as the fact that they are so slow when even slightly complex, and the lack of persistency.  A really useful engine would need a memory, and access to every single parameter it can get, down to individual mask points.

 

With the rise in accessibility, mainly through aescripts.com and Dan Ebberts, I would think that opening up more advanced features would actually benefit the noobs and non-coders too, because the community can do more without the bigger, slower, more expensive, proprietory developers.