They complement each other. There are certain things that I’d love to pull up a command line for (e.g. quickly aligning dozens of objects using a non trivial heuristic); but on the other hand there are plenty of things where the act of visually working through it, placing multiple options side by side on the canvas, rearranging things by hand etc., helps in solving the problem itself.

What would be really nice is if we had a solid set of standards for inter operation, such that I could work on the same video editing project in After Effects, through the command line, through some open source tools someone else wrote... etc.

I have a project right now where I have assets generated in Sketch, some other assets generated by Python scripts, all feeding into an AE project, the output of which gets fed back into some of the Python scripts... I can do great things, but it’s super kludgy/buggy to work with, and as a software engineer see so many trivial ways in which it could all be so much faster and more pleasant to work with (e.g. After Effects natively only supports very limited JS like scripting, so I have to have duplicated Python + AE code... and if the AE motion tracker could serialize tracking data for Python...).

I’m not holding my breath because this kind of computing, while more aligned in philosophy with the early composable UNIX roots, is IMO most entirely incompatible with the state of the (creative) software industry/economy (Adobe, like everyone else, would like to do as much as they can so that you do not give any of your time or money to creative software other than Adobe’s).