General Lag and unresponsiveness is one of MANY performance issues I've had for the last several versions and keep hoping they'll get fixed. I've uninstalled, cleaned, reinstalled multiple times. Sometimes it improves temporarily, sometimes not. Just sending a project from AE to ME, with ME open takes 30-45 seconds. Once there, clicking on encoding options can take another minute for the panel to open. Cancelling a render, when ME gets to a frame that it gets stuck on (and will remain stuck for 15 minutes) - cancelling that job takes longer than force quitting and restarting. Maybe it's plug-ins I have installed? I spent a day uninstalling one at a time and testing once, and not sure I ever found anything conclusive. If it is the problem, there should be a way for ME to detect that and report the problem to the user. I gave up on ME in 2018 and started using BGrenderer MAX, but with the most recent Mac OS update, BGR is now broken too - until Adobe or Apple can a address a code change that broke it. So now I'm back to my struggle to get ME to work. My AE and ME are always up to date. Sometimes new versions work better, but it's usually temporary. I'm on a 2019 Mac Pro. This issue is not specific to certain AE projects, but it does seem worse on the more complex ones.