Marketing had no say in how this feature was developed. None. The decision, right or wrong, was made by the After Effects engineering team. 

We absolutely could have invested the entire team on 3D and provided our users a 3D-centric release with a faster software renderer, 3D primitives, etc. We decided very early on that CS6 wasn't going to be a "3D" release, but we also felt we needed to start the journey towards more 3D as well as provide users a way to make great looking 3D logos and 3D text. We received A LOT of help of NVIDIA. That allowed us to dedicate 80-90% of the AE team to things like the new caching model, 3D camera tracker, etc. while still preserving our ability to deliver something on the 3D front.

By the way, we visit our customers frequently, especially if we're about to make a huge decision like this. The customers we visited validated this approach. Many of them already used C4D or another 3D app in conjunction with AE, so they simply wanted to see movement in native 3D with the assumption we'd then be able to have better interchange with 3D apps. These customers were not interested in doing simple text and shapes in 3D in the CS6 timeframe since they already had 3D solutions. The customers we visited that were interested in doing simple text and shapes in 3D were comfortable buying a $1000 GPU for their tower computer in order to use the feature. It's possible we visited the wrong people, or that the computing environment has changed significantly since we made those visits.

I'm not interested in debating whether or not it was a good decision. We're already focused on what to do next, but I thought it worthwhile letting you guys know some of the logic behind the decision.

Dan Ramirez

AE QE/CS6 Product Owner

p.s., sorry about this coming from a gmail address. The adobe email doesn't play nicely with this list so I just use my personal email.