I'm frustrated with the amount of redundant file prep i'm having to do on a current job and I'm wondering if there's a faster way. I'm tasked with animating some little vignettes for a travel show.

A friend is illustrating the shot in photoshop and then i have to animate from the PSD. Ideally I would just import the PSD into AE and go, but I can't. A lot of the assets are vector objects so I end up opening EVERY SINGLE smart vector object in AI and then I have to save all these layers out as AI files. I thought maybe I could import the PSD into AE and convert it to shape layers or an AI file there, but no dice. I should also mention that I have to scale up all these vector assets 200% because sometimes I need layers larger than they appear in the PSD, and if I use continually rasterize it often screws up any effects or puppeting I have on my layer. This takes an enormous amount of time and my client doesn't understand why I can't turn these things out in a day or two, and I have to make these dubious-sounding excuses of how I have to 'prepare' all these assets for animation. Is there a faster way? And am I the only one who scales up all their AI assets before bringing into AE?