the best way to place crowds of animated objects So I am a seasoned veteran in blender, but I have been having problems with 2.8+. it seems as they added functionality, they have yet to replace the legacy ways of operating
the problem is, I have a stadium, and fans to place into it, but no simple way of doing that for a various set of reasons
I have currently tried to following:
Duplifaces:
as they do work for placement, they don't work with collections or animated offsets (to my knowledge as I can't seem to find anything on it)
Particles:
This was incredibly weird all things considered. good collections support for randomly distributing my collection, particle lifetimes give random offsets, however object rotations and the ability to orient by the normal of the emitter do not work... at all... in fact they should simply take them out if they are not planning on using them properly (I am pretty sure they worked in 2.79)
Crowd Master:
now i have seen this, but its a huge investment for what i need, if it has the ability to actually do what blender simply can't, then I'm up for it...
I was wondering if there is any simple way to pull this off
Maybe something like this?
All the particles are oriented towards the center of the emitter using Advanced Rotation settings for Hair particles:

I made a subdivided plane circular using a Simple Deform modifier.
Since the particles are emitted from the faces, I subdivided the faces in the back for a more even distribution.

I sloped the plane a bit and adjusted the rotation of the source objects of the particles accordingly and now it's like I'm in a stadium : )

EDIT:
It doesn't have to be Hairs; it can be Emitter.

I have no experience randomizing starting time of particle animations, though.

I'm not sure using Lifetime Randomness (which I assume you're referring to in your comment) can get the desired result.
I think you'd have to use something like this Animation Nodes add-onn
If you can do it without an add-on, I'd be interested to know how you do that. : )