Would be possible to have couple of options for particles.
Ability to render them in 3d mode.

Best possible solution would be if there would be an option to disable certain axis for the particles.
So they dont turn on every axis.
That way you would have possibilities to play with the particle texture.

particles are 2d sprites, and they are always rotated only on the 2d screen (relative the camera)

you can just manually draw 3d meshes in blend mode instead

instead of particles.draw
simple pseudo-code:
REPA(particles.p)mesh.drawBlend(particles.p[i].pos);