As usual I'm looking for the simplest solution that fits my needs and I found it.
I created a TilesetEngine class that loads the tiles in QImages (because it's so simple), processes them, and then converts them over to QPixmaps where they're broken up into individual tiles and cached in memory for speed (perks of tiny simple 8x8 tiles, there's no memory footprint). The engine allows you to directly request a frame number and it'll render the static image with animated tiles matching the requested frame number.
That was the hard part because there was quite a bit of processing and post-processing but with that out of the way I created a QQuickImageProvider that serves as a sort of loose bridge and allows for a for extra options in the "id" such as specifying a scale size in the id since Qt Quick wasn't calling the const QSize& requestedSize. This was pretty easy to do.
With that registered to QML I just drop in a single id string, the id string specifies all options of how I want the engine to render the tileset from the animation frame, certain overlays, which tileset, etc... and the id string also tells the provider if I want it scaled or if I want the whole tileset image or just a single tile id. This was also super easy a lot of fun.
Then for more fun I threw in a timer in QML and requested all the frames in the animation one-by-one and had it loop around. Here I could watch the animation and tileset or tiles come to life and animate.
The whole thing was very straightforward, easy, and a ton of fun. The only hard part was the engine whcih got real gritty in pixel manipulation but QImage, QPaint, QPixelmap, and QColor took th bulk of the work out so it could have been more difficult if it weren't for Qt's convenience classes.
I'm so glad I never mangled with any of the OpenGL stuff or my original plan, a QQuickItem or QQuickPainted Item. This solution was perfect and easy and fits everything I need it to do,