I haven’t messed around with Sprites yet, but what you’re trying to do can be easily accomplished with a plane and a Material, as you said yourself.
The material setup (using Customized UVs to move coordinates in an optimized way):
Customized UVs change the same UVs Texture Samples use, but once for each vertex instead of each pixel. As Texture Samples use the coordinate index 0 by default, customizing UV0 already alters the default textures coordinate.
Changing the coordinates Scalar Parameters in Blueprint:
Result:
