Combustion is harder than AE, and I don't know it anywhere near as well as I wish I did....but it's a stronger and more used tool in the big leagues than AE for a reason...It's better. Kino Gil spent a whole day teaching me how to light with Combustion and I still don' thave it down well. And he's one of the Combustion guru's.

I use After Effects. It has a learning curve as well as any other product does. I have not used Combustion - but if it matters I used to edit on a D/Vision NLE (Which I still have actually) and that sort of went under and was purchased by a company in Canada who did nothing with and than was resold and re-emerged under the Discreet product line as Edit. (And as other software was bought up the Edit line is gone but it's modules have been morphed into other software) And that seems the be what Discreet is doing - buying up other software and putting it out there. I am not saying it isn't good, I am just saying they take already exisiting software and remold it to their product line. (Oh...shudder...SoFo to Sony...oh shudder. Vegas becomes like "Sony XPRI-Smoke 1" or something. LOL)

Anyhow - I use AE and I like it. Lots of plug-ins out there for it, lots of info out there, lots of training out there. Overall the Discreet line is finding its way into much more...I guess, "higher end" places. Many, if not all, of the plug-ins out there for AE also come in Combustion flavors anymore. I would think the learning curve is greater with the Discreet stuff only because it isn't so "easy" to acess learning material. Having said that it does not mean you can not turn out professional results with only Combustion. You can do it with AE as well. (And Vegas to for that matter). But if you want to hop over to most any book store, and some non-book stores, you will probably find some sort of help book for an Adobe product. It is not as easy for Discreet products.

EDIT - in looking around the discreet site I found this:
In 1997 D-Vision 3.0, later to become edit*, debuted at NAB and took home top honors from magazine editors who praised its features, options, usability and performance as secondto none in the new media arena. It was, and is, a breakthrough desktop editing application. [SNIP] Add the considerable commitment to excellence that Discreet brings to all of its products and edit* is the fastest, most stable and robust nonlinear editing application to be found on any desktop system. [SNIP] And if you added paint* and effect* to your edit* system - effect* offers 2D and 3D compositing, animation, color correction, keying, sophisticated and highly accurate motion tracking, ray trace drop shadows and After

it goes on to hype the system and adds in this - edit*, paint* and effect* are powerful applications that are enhanced in a networked environment. Turning the digital production studio into a networked production facility will allow creative professionals to work side by side on the same job or on different jobs. In short, networked production systems can help producers and boutique post houses deliver a better product and generate more income doing it.

This is really great stuff and you have to look at what Vegas 5 now offers for a tiny, tiny fraction of what edit* cost. Also - the last comment in the hype of why one should purchase an edit* system is a pretty funny statement:

Discreet customers can have total confidence that we will be here tomorrow, next week, next year and well into the future.

Why is this funny? Support page for edit* says - Following the discontinuation of edit* product sales in June 2002, please be advised that technical support for edit has been discontinued as of August 31st 2003