In this work we revisit the topic of two-dimensional Bose–Einstein condensates under the influence of time-dependent magnetic confinement and time-dependent scattering length. A moment approach reduces the examination of moments of the wavefunction (in particular, of its width) to an Ermakov–Pinney (EP) ordinary differential equation (ODE). We use the well-known structure of the solutions of this nonlinear ODE to “engineer” trapping and interatomic interaction conditions that lead to condensates dispersing, breathing or even collapsing. The advantage of the approach is that it is fully tractable analytically, in excellent agreement with our numerical observations. As an aside, we also discuss how similar time-dependent EP equations may arise in the description of anisotropic scalar field cosmologies.