What features do you think you need for these VFX that your engine is lacking? Apart from the pulse shader (which, as you say, is almost done) - i don’t see anything that you cannot achieve with simple particles with some basic over-lifetime controls (size, rotation, speed, transparency, e.t.c.). You don’t need a sprite animation for every movement: a static splatter texture, with some nice particle animation and alpha-erosion (if possible, not required) in most cases gives you as good of a result as a pre-animated fluid (have a look here, for example: VFX For Games Tutorial 01: How to hand paint realistic blood! Full tutorial on hand crafted liquids)
If you need to render both sides of a plane - you may always just dublicate that plane and flip it’s normals.
And what exactly do you need “texture proximity fading” for?