AE’s main competition now being Nuke, be mindful that AE’s continuing advantage will be in CREATIVE and design tasks. Pursuant to that, for the next version of AE I’d like to see two things I’ve long asked for: PS Brushes and fonts, both embedded in the project or saved as a sidecar cache file, so that the file will open with those resources in future versions or on basic render installs. I would say better scaling too, but you’re already on board.

For the long-term future, I think the AE project concept needs to change for the bigger, and become a multi-user database interoperable with it’s suite-mate applications, particularly PR and SG, that’s really about workgroup efficiency and project management. Instant updating of artist contributions, history, messaging, speculative rendering servers, etc. Instead of being centered on the Project, it needs to be centered on the Job, which would consist of many shots within a larger program. Each of those shots may have an entire Project’s worth of stuff going on, and the Job conforms all those shots into a finished program.

It goes without saying that this isn’t a Next Version goal. But one might think about the file format(s) needed to accomplish this, keep it as open as possible to 3rd party contributions and scripting, and start implementing it on whatever level.