Hello, this is my first post.
I’ve been playing with Unity indie whenever I have some spare time, but I found some issues that can be deal breaking for me, so I’d like some advice on how to get around them:
1 - Timing - I’m primarily an animator, so precise timing control is extremely important. Having a stable, predictable frame rate is actually more important for me than having it as high as possible (but at a completely different rate than the monitor). I understand that users with different hardware make this difficult, but now that Unity can publish on Iphone and Wii, it seems like it could be addressed, since you know exactly what to expect. So… my question is: how do I limit the frame rate, and ensure the game will run as much as possible close to that frame rate (delta timing will make the necessary correction if the rate falls momentarily, of course)
2 - Performance - This ties into the first question. Whenever I make a REALLY simple scene, like a cube crossing the screen against an empty background, the motion always “stutters”, it is never really smooth. I believe some of it is related to timing (having the game running at, let’s say, 50 fps on a 60 hertz monitor will duplicate one frame every 5 frames, causing the motion to stutter). But it may have some other explanation… the reason I ask is that I’ve been playing with Python / Pygame, and I managed to get “console-like”, really silky smooth motion on the first try, without even using hardware acceleration! And that’s on an interpreted language, running on the same machine…is there a way to improve results on Unity?
3 - Last but not least, can I use animated 2D sprites (with multiple movement sequences) on 3D planes inside Unity? How? The project I’m planning now would look so much better (from an artistic standpoint) with 2D characters over a simple 3D background! Modeling and rigging it all in 3D is not a big challenge, since that’s what I’ve been doing for a living for years, but would make me so sad inside! 
I actually got that working great with Pygame and my own code to handle it, but on unity I don’t know how to use just a section of an image as a texture, and update that section on every frame… also sounds like it would be slow.
4 - Oh, oh, one more! I’ve read that with Unity Pro you can trim down unnecessary libraries that you know you’re not gonna use in order to cut down the final file size. Is this true? If yes, is it a relatively painless process? Does it make a significant difference if I could remove, let’s say, support for physics, shaders and scripting languages other than Jscript? (yes, my games will use very basic tech!.. :-D)
Any help is appreciated!