After Effects

I HATE After Effects. It is entirely too complicated for what it should be. The entire interface is NOT user friendly and the help section is worthless because it just does a Google search!! It took me over 4 hours to figure out how to do a 007 blood drip down the screen and then we didn't even use it. I was also having a terrible time trying to figure out how to speed up some portions of the video and slow down others. I had to cut the footage, separate them into two levels and then speed up and slow down accordingly...which wasn't very smooth. I tried doing that in Premiere...still not intuitive. That took another 3 hours. At about the time I was ready to smash my computer because I hate Adobe, I gave the files to another group member to work the sound. 20 minutes later he tells me he CANNOT see anything I did! Then, he could see the blood drip and no video or text. So he and another member tried to figure out how to see it. The third member who got involved saw it, changed it, and sent it back out right when 2nd group member got to see my video! Its really stupid that After Effects doesn't save and export the video on it's own...as in if you don't have the actual footage you can't see the composited AF video! To make it even less useable, you can't export it into any format other than AF or Flash! Thank you Adobe for making a completely unintuitive, non user friendly, and unhelpful product built by masters for masters...