With GOs, I think the minimum is still something like 3 draw calls per clipped layers. One for the things you are clipping, one for drawing their masks, one for drawing the render target. Then you would need 2 predicates per layer too. You currently cannot do this without using a render target with GOs as far as I know. Multi texture support is still not in. I could make a simplified sample project closer to what you want sometime in the future.
Multi texturing isn’t in yet Defold roadmap H1-2019 - Q1 summary
I don’t know how it will work but hopefully it will make doing stuff like this easier. It needs to be able to really intelligent about UV space for textures in atlases to be useful for this if it’s just ability to apply multiple textures straight to a sprite it will barely be useful. Ideally we want to be able to apply multiple kinds of textures from atlases so we can do other cool things like complex lighting on sprites eventually too.