This all started with a desire to pass the ‘life’ attribute of a particle system in a material rendered with EEVEE, not Cycles. (not supported in cycles) I wanted to do this in order to render ‘card’ type particles of 2D images/materials on planes in EEVEE, because Cycles would not be able to handle possibly 100s of redundant layers of transparency, but EEVEE can in a blink.
I’ve been using this a LOT ever since I made it, and have made improvements on the way, but I’m a perfectionist, and there are a handful of bugs and qwirks… that I don’t have the capacity to explain in this post… but I have to throw this out there…
Heres (1) example in action, I guess I’m a (new) user so I can only post one 
maybe it will allow me to comment some more vids
Not the most amazing effect, but this post is more about the process/tool than the results here: this is endlessly flexible.
I was able to do this with Geometry Nodes, although it won’t allow me to post more media to show… :(. Anyway, this got fairly complicated with a lot of custom NodeGroups for clarity, so you might be better off visiting my site (linked below , sharpen3d.com), and grabbing the github from there… or wait for a youtube tutorial to publish (which I will hopefully link here in the future?).
There are a lot of advantages to creating particles this way, loopable particles, complete position control, predictable randomization. For these effects, in addition to the nodes, I have written a custom panel to clarify and more neatly organize typical aspects of ‘particles’. With this, the geometry nodes can essentially stay hidden from a user’s perspective, unless they want a specific effect not available in the panel.
There is too much to explain in a post here, so if you are interested, please, check out sharpen3d.com hosts a link to my github, containing this and other experimental projects. Everything other than (this) particles mostly has been documented on that site. I’ve been working on an API and a explanation video, but was wondering if this is even something people would have interest in? Please! let me know any questions/comments 
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