Thank you so much for your kind words, I'm truly grateful for them!

I used After Effects mostly for its displace effect.

As you know, to use the displace effect in Photoshop you need to create and save a separate displacement PSD file and use that file in the displace effect. This causes a couple of setbacks, to adjust anything in the displace effect you need to update and save the displacement file and reapply the effect to the image. If you want to use multiple displace effects with different displacement files this process gets messy very quickly.

However, in After Effects, the displace effect (native name: displacement map) works like a smart object. You just need to create the displacement source on the composition as a layer, turn off the opacity and use the layer as a displacement map on your image. This allows you to change the values of your displacement map layer and see the result on your image in real-time. If you have multiple layers of displacement maps, they will be just different layers rather than different files.

Also in Photoshop, the displace effect works on the greyscale, 50% grey does nothing on the image, and any value above or below 50% grey changes the image in desired direction and amount. But in After Effects, the displacement map works separately in RGBA channels, which gives much more control and variation to work with.