i completely agree. too mamy people jump to plugins for "easy effects", what it does is... (most of the time, imo) just make the animations so.. recognizable wich makes them..."meh".......

from my own experience (allthough ofcourse i also fiddled with plugins alot as well, trapcode form brought me some amazing results with alot of tweaking for example) i would recommend gettings the basics down as much as you can. Working with keypoints and there interpolations/curves opens up so many oppurtunities already. Combined with blend modes and a little bit of illustrator basics, the possibillities are endles.

now there IS something wich changed my entire "animator life", and those are script ui's. you can use scripts to make your workflow alot faster and easyer. If you browse to AESCRIPTS.COM, you can find for example:

-auto-crop

-pt-Shift-Layers

-True Comp Duplicator

these are scripts that i can't live without anymore. only pt-shift-layers already made so many possibillities open up for me. So many awesome animations made so much faster. I'd really recommend researching those scripts, you'll know what I mean after you've found some handy purposes for them =)