It would be extremely helpful to be able to define our own render tokens somehow. We often have very long and complex filenames that string together common elements like "Project Code," "Client Name," "Project Name," "Deliverable Name," "First/Last Initials," "Version Number", "Language"

It would be helpful to be able to define these somewhere in the AE project, perhaps as metadata, and then allow them to be used as render tokens/properties that can be used in the existing File Name and Location Templates.

Sure, we can manually enter this information ourselves when we go to render. We could also rename our comps this way (though comp readability would become terrible). But it becomes a chore when we have dozens or hundreds of files to render. It would help with quality-of-life and ease-of-use to be able to set up these tokens once per project and reuse them. Filenames and render folder locations would be much more consistent (even when sharing the project with multiple artists on different teams) and would require less constant fiddling to make sure we're putting things in the right place.

Being able to set a "Project Root Folder" for example would also address these other issues, where we want to render to specific folders in a folder structure and we don't want to worry about where in that structure the AE project itself lives:
https://adobe-video.uservoice.com/forums/911311-after-effects/suggestions/37543408-a-render-settings-token-that-allows-you-to-climb-u
https://adobe-video.uservoice.com/forums/911311-after-effects/suggestions/41679958-render-queue-remember-projectname-token-on-exp

Being able to set a "Version Number" would also address this issue:
https://adobe-video.uservoice.com/forums/911311-after-effects/suggestions/41125603-add-project-version-number-as-a-render-token-prope

I would like to see ALT+Drag to copy/duplicate for layers in the timeline and assets in the project panel. Its a standard function for the rest of the adobe suite and for some reason its missing from AE. There's not even an alternate function, its just missing. I understand holding alt and dragging selected key frames in the timeline does temporal stretch. so I see why it might be harder to implement for key frames without upsetting current functions. But, this seems to be a missing feature that would be widely appreciated for those of us that use the wider adobe tool set.

So it has been a long time since i needed to create proxies for after effects, but today I did and was horrified by the workflow.

You have to literally do it one-by-one for each file in the project list. Alternatively, AE likes to just create a useless composition, per piece of footage instead to render, and then re-links all of those to the proxy.

There is no way to batch link them! I decided just to do it in media encoder and do it one by one.

This could massively be improved by being able to select several pieces of footage in the project panel and right click to re-link to proxies created (potentially externally with media encoder). Or it could be a scriptUI panel with a few user options that looks at the filename with a given variable prefix/append, ie.myfootageproxy and point it to a folder (either where the source footage is or maybe a custom one i.e. proxies) and it just iterates through your selection in the project window and links them up.

So that's for re-linked existing proxies, but the actual proxy creation within after effects could be improved too. Right clicking each piece of footage and selecting create proxy, or dragging a section of footage to the render queue for AE to make a middleman composition is cumbersome. AE should ask the user what re-link behaviour is on creation, i.e. re-link to the preComp or the source footage itself.

Thank you!

Can we please have a separate keyframe property for mask feather - the one done with the mask feather tool? Right now the feather values are stored in the mask property keyframes, but this is really bad for workflow - I'don't know a single roto artist that does feathering while doing the shapes - it's always shapes first, for the entire shot, and then a second pass to do the feathering. The way it works now is I have to set the feather in each mask keyframe that was done without a feather, which is counter intuitive since feathers require much less keyframes than shapes - very often they don't require keyframes at all. But even in that case we can't edit the feathering after the fact because now it's stored in every single mask keyframe - and we sometimes have a couple hundred keyframes for the mask shape. Basically right now if you don't get your feathering perfect while you're doing shapes, then you'll spend as much time correcting it as it took to do the shapes in the first place - it sucks :/

AE is pretty good at remembering last used directories. It remembers separate directories for import, scripts, render - it's really nice. But things get annoying when I'm working on a couple projects at the same time. I have to surf the file dialogs throughout the entire day.
It would be nice if in the project preferences we could have a checkbox saying that I want this project to use it's own default directories, and then I would be able to hardcode the directories for this given project.
So now, if a project doesn't have this option selected, it uses the current directory-memory-buffer that AE has, but if I open a project with this option selected, AE stops using the buffer but instead defaults to the hardcoded directories that are specified to this particular project.