Hi all, thanks for your encouragement and feature suggestions. I am noting them all down, so keep them coming! Time for a quick progress update 
My focus at the moment is to make a VERY rough and ready prototype of the core feature set the plugin needs to be usable. This is so I can discover any blocking issues early before I come back and reimplement everything properly. I have made a basic asset pipeline for setting up sprites and rendering them through the batched renderer. This also includes auto creating dynamic materials inside the renderer dependent on what the sprites need.
Doing this has highlighted some issues that are a little problematic:
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I cannot see a way to implement priority layer rendering that will override depth sorting into scene. This means all render sorting must be done via camera depth, which is not ideal. I can still implement layer helpers that will control visibility, selection and auto depth placement, but it will not be as flexible as having a true render order ability.
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Editor selection on batched geometry is also proving problematic. The only way I have managed to solve this atm is to not batch anything while in the editor viewport. This allows things to be selected individually in editor and then batch as normal in game view. The downside to this is performance in editor and selecting things when testing the game will not work correctly. There may be a better solution to this that Iām still investigating.
Next I want to dig into how the layer system will work as this is potential blocker to the plugin being developed if a usable solution cannot be found.