Animated tiles and blending between different tiles on a mesh tilemap

So i now know how to make a mesh and use the uv's to draw tiles on it. I have been reading about how to animate the tiles and i came across 2 methods: -change the uv's to point to the different frames of the animation -use setpixels to do the animations

Both methods however come across as bruteforcing. What is the correct way of doing animations on a tilemap on a mesh? Isnt there some more elegant way of doing this?

Another thing is i want to apply blended transitions between the tiles. I used to do this with color.lerp when i was still using a separate gameobject for each tile. Basically i was calculating a new texture that would fit in nicely on the fly. This worked nicely for what i needed. But this doesnt work (well atleast I think :P) with a tilemap on a mesh.