Personally, I think the word 'sprite' has a different meaning to each person who uses it. Per wikipedia, a Sprite is an object independent of the background artwork that can move around the screen or play field, possibly an animation so the character appears to be 'walking', 'running', or any other of a number of moves that particular character can make. (IE: Also could be a missle with a trail of fire that explodes on impact).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sprite_(computer_graphics)
As far as moving forward, that's going to be a personal choice. There are just as many ways to use sprites as there are video games to play. For instance, you can combine individual sprites (frames) into a sprite sheet which your program iterates through to produce the display. This can be something like a simple 5 frame walking animation, or a huge, complex sheet that has ALL of the moves for a particular character/level.
See: http://www.spriters-resource.com/fullview/5572/
So, for moving forward, do you pursue a large sprite sheet or collections of 5-10 frame animations? Again, all up to you. Personally, I have pretty much decided that I'm going with single frames for the foreseeable future. I've tried several methods using larger sheets, and the simple 5-10 frame animations and that adds quite a bit of complexity to a project, to track which frame you're currently on, where in the sprite sheet you are, are we at the end of the width? if so, we need to move down some and reset the beginning to zero so we're on the leftmost frame again. And this is assuming that all of the frames in the sprite sheet are the same size - AND that they are all aligned correctly!
Using single frames, you drop all of that and pretty much just have to track what the current frame is. Additionally, if you have to change the artwork later in development, you'll save yourself a tremendous headache because you wont have to adjust the entire sprite sheet to reflect that one frame that is now slightly wider than the original. You just have to edit one frame at a time, and move on to the next!
Anyways, just my thoughts. Like I said, I think that the word Sprite has different meanings to different people, so if I've misunderstood the question, forgive me!
Have a great day, and good luck on your project!
(Oh, and I second what Brett208 said in the other thread…. for only about 6 hours in, you're making great progress!!)