First of all, thanks for the response. I had a quick look at flip and while it looks like a cool and useful plugin, I think it only has a small overlap with the stuff I'm planning to do. I also had a look at the linked pens by OSUblake and there are quite a few nice things in there too.
Again, thank you for the search results but from what I could see by skipping through those videos, they mostly did not do complex stuff for the animations and are basically where I already am. I've got a working game with most of the basic stuff a player can do, win/lose handling, spawning and moving of new tiles/gems and all that, even chain reactions and combos for special effects. What I currently do is "staggering" animations by "knowing" the duration of previous animations and adding a computed delay to later animations in the timeline.
Right now I want to introduce prettier eased animations and other effects in a timely manner and clean way that keeps the project manageable and scalable.