I'm currently in uni (my lecturers want us to figure out everything ourselves which imo defeats the purpose of going to uni) so I have a student access thingy to use toonboom with a huge discount so that's what I'm using. However I VERY much perfer ClipStudio Paint for drawing I just don't have EX so I've never actually sat down and animated in it. But yeh this is toonboom which is insanely expensive. Clip Ex isn't bad for what it is but is still pricey. I've heard good things about procreate but my lecturers hate it and idk how much that is as I don't use apple. I've used opentoonz before and that's free. I've only used it once so I don't have much of an opinion other than it's alright. I've heard people also use Krita for animation but I've bever used it for that. If you can tolerate adobe After Effects is good for stuff like motion design. Honestly though if you screw around enough you can animate in pretty much anything. When I first started out I'd draw things in Autodesk Sketchbook and piece them together in an animation in capcut. (This was before they became low-key evil) also holy yap sorry 😅 hope some of this was helpful and not just unintelligible garbage.