I held out from having to use AME when CC came out, but now Adobe has removed the "allow deprecated formats" option in 2014 we have no choice but to use it for most of the content we're outputting.
Three things make this a bloody awful workflow, at the moment:
1) It doesn't remember where you last rendered to, and will always try to save the output in the same folder as the project. For professionals, this is utterly stupid. Our AE projects are saved in a central folder, but outputs go into a subfolder of a subfolder of the client's main folder - something like X:\CLIENTS\ABC_Corp\2014\July14\Projectname\outputs\. We frequently have to output a list of comps in one go, so having to navigate down this kind of path structure every time is a massive waste of time.
2) When rendering from AE, you can define presets based on filetype without having to specify an output resolution - so for example, we're currently outputting content for screens at a major outdoor festival. There are 5 screens in all with 4 different resolutions, but they all need to be in Quicktime DXV format. From AE, this is simple: it doesn't have to care what resolution the file ends up at, we can use one DXV preset for all five files. From AME, we would have to define four different presets, one for each resolution. I tried this, and AME gave me the "bleat of death". AE rendered them out fine.
3) AME is SLOOOOW. I can have multiple copies of AE running and render in the background anyway, quicker than AME. AME adds extra time faffing to get each render set up, and then seems to render slower than AE.
Oh, and:
4) AME isn't as good as AE at keeping a history of what's been rendered and how long it took. When opening up a project in AE, I might not have created it to start with, or I might have just forgotten how long each render took. It's not always obvious whether a 60" clip might take 2 hours to render, or two minutes. AME doesn't make it obvious how long something took and when it was last rendered - I know this is in its logs, but something more human-readable would be an improvement.
When can we see a bit of development of AME to bring it up to standard?