I know OpenFL is mainly built for screen targets, but it has a lot of useful functionality added to base HaXe that I would love to use in a command-line utility I need to build. Is there a way to compile an openfl project without opening or requiring a screen?
You may want to read this thread "Headless" server-side mode?. Headless just means a program without any visual display so usually a command line app.
Totally possible, the Lime and SWF tools do this already 
Could you point me to a good example in the github repo? It would help me tremendously, as it is quite hard for a novice like me to find a way around the pretty quickly growing project…
Sure, the first (and most important) question is whether you can use Lime (standard Lime API or OpenFL ‘next’) or whether you need to use Lime legacy.
The path you take varies a bit between these two different types of binaries. Actually, the OpenFL “next” path might even work without binaries at all. Basically, this is the difference between copying “ndll” folders into your project (or pointing to a matching Lime install) or just being a compiled Neko script (with no binaries) at the end of the day
For reference, Lime tools use Lime, while the SWF library still uses Lime legacy due to some shape drawing code
Thanks. I got it working… running into some performance issues now but that is a separate issue