Hey Todd, I can't help but respond to Adobe's "explanation" as to why this change was made. And I quote,
"The reason that we removed the H.264, MPEG-2, and WMV exporters from the After Effects render queue is simple: Maintaining these exporters in After Effects took quite a lot of work, and fixing several significant bugs in these exporters would take even more work." Wow, you literally, before any other reason(s) use a, "this is just too much work" excuse. That's sad. Just saying.
"We could have done this work, but it would have subtracted a lot from the resources that we had available to develop other features and fix other bugs." FYI, features that a good percentage of your user base doesn't use and/or need. You must know this. Some nice new video production features for sure, but I make software, as do A LOT of us and we'd prefer you spent time keeping the software we have running vs. cutting perfectly good features for sake of features we won't use.
"Since Adobe Media Encoder already had superior H.264, MPEG-2, and WMV exporting capabilities, it was more prudent to rely on Adobe Media Encoder for export of these formats." I think Takasaurus documented the truth of this matter above. And nicely done. If by "superior" you mean slower. You're right. However, I question your use of the word "superior."
"This allowed the After Effects team to focus our efforts on animation, motion graphics, compositing, and digital imaging features—our core areas." OK, focus up, but then why do you render at all? If you don't have the resources to maintain deprecated formats, why would I trust you with a full res render? Those must be super easy to maintain, right?
My dad used to say, "Your excuses are your own. You should probably keep them to yourself because the rest of us are getting things done."
