100% what you said. One thing I ran into as well was that horrid after effects -> Lottie workflow. Many layers and styles also just don’t work when you export them, so you have to explain to motion designers which features they’re allowed to use and which they aren’t, which a lot of time they’re not thrilled about.
In many cases just rendering a video and binding playback to interaction is much more lightweight and less work-intensive than using Lottie.
I’ve heard about Rive before and a lot of the choices they make seem to be exact fixes for the issue of Lottie. I haven’t worked with it yet however, so YMMV.
I haven't worked with Rive either, but those I've known who did have seemed pretty over the moon about it, fwiw.
Rive players are open source, so I assume the format is too?
Or worse! You get handed off something unrealistic that won’t compile to lottie but “client has signed off”