I'm Beginning To Hate Animation

For the longest I can remember, I've been absolutely amazed by animation. I have had so many ideas with animation and what I could do with it, especially in an anime sense. I even wanted to make a career out of it. BUT NOW. In my game design class, we are doing animation through adobe illustrator and Adobe After Effects. With these two pieces of software, it is literally IMPOSSIBLE to not lose your mind once you go through the process of exporting EACH and EVERY frame and editing that stupid rubber ball so it squashes and stretches. The worst part is that this is probably the most insufficient way of producing and animation, but OF COURSE, we have to learn to walk before we run, THE ANALOGY MAKES NO SENSE WHATSOEVER. THIS ISN'T WALKING AT ALL, THIS IS TIME-CONSUMING, TIRING AND MIND DETERIORATING. THIS IS RUNNING!!!!. The literal process of this project is to create a bouncing ball. We are forced to do this the hard way, meaning that we make a background, make 120 balls in the position they need to be in for animation, then export every...single...one. Lord. Then you're not done! Hohoho! you then align the 120 frames to be put in 24 frames per second. I have not even read the rest of the instructions and I already know that there is more. This project we have is way too exhausting at its honestly making me hate animation. I understand that this is the hardest way to produce a traditional animation and that there are easier ways, but I have such anger with this that despite there being other ways, I will still have steam coming out of my ears once we get our next animation assignment. I personally have to redo the assignment due to my background being awful, meaning I must export all 120 frames once again while putting the squash and stretch features onto the stupid rubber ball. This is too much for me and I really don't think that it will be easy for me to love animation again after this.