I'm doing this in my 2d games projects, it's amazing because you have total control of every single frames with no need to re-export from blender everytime. and it seems very reliable. But yes you need alot more scripts than if you were just exporting animations.
Note i'm doing this because i'm animating spritesheets so i can't use the blender NLA editor for this.
but for 3d skeletal animations you can use it so i'm not sure it's a good idea to go without animations. but i dont know. honestly i never tried to go single animation with 3D stuff. I can just say it is working great for animating UVoffsets.
By the way setting-up animations is tedious indeed, eventually you can use this script to semi-automate the process. Edit it, set your frames then simply run it from blender. Hope it helps