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Okay, I did a lot more fiddling with this last night - largely thanks to this YouTube tutorial: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ag1Z-0qKLwA

About 20 mins in there's a bit where the guy builds a series of 2D sprites and uses keyframes (which, yes, you're right, I should flipping well love a lot more) and a timeline. The key bit I was completely missing here was visibility and invisibility, so I ended up doing the following, which worked for me

1) Create each model of the frames of animation (in my case, it was 4 "sprites" of a flamingo flapping its wings)

2) Switch on 'turn off invisiblity preview' in the guides menu. This is important, because you'll be using invisibility / visibility to control what gets shown in each keyframe

3) Once that's done, make all but the first 'frame' of your animation (your first object) invisible.

4) Drop in your first keyframe, then instantly 'stop recording' - that'll preserve the 1st position state of all your objects

5) Clone that first keyframe on your timeline, then make your first frame object invisible, your second visible then click 'stop recording'

6) Do this as many times as you need to for the remaining frames / objects in turn - When you preview it, what you should see is all your frame objects blinking on then off in turn - ANIMATION! YAY!

7) This bit's important if you want to move that object at any point. Group all your frame objects together (whether they're visible or invisible).

8) Scope into that group, and lay all your frame objects on top of each other so that they overlay (this can be quite tricky unless you have something in your object as a common frame of reference - I was lucky in mine that the 'head' position of the sprite doesn't alter for all frames of the animation, so I just used that as the 'guide' to accurately place them so they all line up - you could of course just use a frame or the grid to do the same - in fact I'd strongly recommend use of the grid!)

9) Last but not least, and this bit's pretty important - rewind your creation then preview it (remembering to rewind it again once you come out of preview mode). Et voila, you should have a proper 'frame by frame' animation in a 2D stylee!

Have a look at my "Flapping Flamingo" creation to see the result, and the very very simple logic I used. I'm now looking at making that flamingo flap across a set path on the screen before stopping, turning around then flapping the other way (I initially thought I could do this very simply but got some very odd results trying to do this as a simple tween animation so might have to think again). Showing and hiding objects is a great idea though, would never have thought of that as an approach!