I always have to move my cursor to the corner of the screen when doing full screen previews. It should just disappear.

I use Shift-Numpad 0 to make fullscreen previews. In addition to making the cursor disappear, it would be great to also have an option for scaling the viewer to "Fit" so it's truly full screen. After starting the preview in fullscreen mode, you can then press Shift-/ and that scales to fit. However it would be ideal to set up the preview so one single key command does all these things to create the ideal full screen preview.

Also, could we have have full playback controls during preview similar to Premiere? It would be great to be able to pause, reverse, forward, slow-mo and frame by frame stepping while in full screen preview. "JKL" could be reverse, pause, forward. K+L at the same time could be slow mo. Left and right cursor or page-up/down could be single frame stepping.

We often face the need to round the corners of paths for animation or shape, but AE don't have the appropriate function. But this function that has been implemented in Illustrator for a long time. That function is round point.

How we make it today: Copied paths from AE to Illustrator and used the round point for angles, then copied the path back to after effects, if we don't like it, we do it again.
But why such a long road to this, if it is easy to implement at the software development level.

Let's draw the developers attention to adding this important and ease feature as round point.

It would be helpful to be able to group and color code effects in Effect Controls panel. I often end up with 10 or more effects in the comp control layer and it becomes tedious and difficult visually to find the one I'm after (see attached screenshot). It would be incredibly convenient to be able to create groups like is possible in shape layers, and the ability to color code like we can with layers would also be helpful. It's possible to code and rename effects into groups when making a preset (like in attached screenshot), but this is impractical when working on a stand alone project.

When choosing Inner Shadow or Drop Shadow Layer Style, the screen Blending Mode is not working as it should. Screen acts like Darken or Multiply. Color Dodge etc is also not working as it should.

Viceversa, all darken Blend Modes do not work with Inner Glow. Multiply acts like Screen here.

I don't think this is intended behaviour. Although Shadows are usually meant to darken the underlying colors, when I choose Screen it should be Screen. If I want Multiply it should be Multiply.

There are presets available that use Inner Shadow with Screen and it is a pity that this is not working in at least CC2018, CC2019 and 2020.

In CS6 it works as it should.

I posted after upgrading to 17.1.3 that every time I opened Ae, I got a list of missing plug-ins (see attached). The help guy kind of fixed it by sticking a plug-ins folder on my Desktop (which is not an elegant solution.)
I updated to 17.1.4 earlier expecting the issue to be solved but it's still happening and is now ignoring the work around as well (so back to square 1). The 'missing' plug-ins are actually there, in the correct address string, but Ae isn't recognising them for some reason.
I see from the community, I am not the only one that has faced this.

I've been working with templates a lot recently. So far the experience in After Effects is not bad at all. Going in Premiere however is not so fun. I would suggest an expression control for timecode units so the user can decided what time they want the animation to appear. The other method of this is sliders and too many expressions to deal with like start time, duration, end time. The units are whole numbers and seconds so the user might have to do a bit of math or they won't be able to get to those crucial half seconds. (If anyone knows how to do this however please let me know, I have searched and can't find anything).

Furthermore on my experience:
The positions Axis isn't as intuitive as AE, meaning there's a delay (not my computer - I have a new iMac) so it's not as smooth as AE. Tried to find how to add only the X axis or only the Y axis but couldn't so that would be good also when adding position to Essential Graphics. The Essential Graphics window in AE is quite easy to read until you get too much information, this is where the dropdown comes in handy but moving to Premiere I can't process the information as easily - I have a processing disorder which also includes a few learning difficulties so improving this would make it more accessible. Maybe slight highlights or colours that separate the information.