[tonyle]

I came across this post a few years ago, reminds me of the javascript games written 15+ years ago. For a lot of use cases, This technique is simple and has good enough performance. http://buildnewgames.com/dom-sprites/

Also,take a look at http://createjs.com/. It is pretty familiar if you come from a flash background. The latest version of adobe flash/animate exports to createjs so you can keep using your old flash authoring skills for your assets.

However, If time is your major constraint, unity might not be as overkill as you might think.