I think you have something similar to what I’be been pondering these past days (asking here Data management in games with lots of items/enemies/objects - #9 by playmedusa)
So what about your gameobjects? I understand anything you are showing on screen is a go, but you can have some kind of ‘generic go factory’ and then configure each instance with its atlas and sprite?
I’m trying to figure out if I can move as much code to basic Lua modules as possible, but then there are unavoidable parts like input, particles, sound, sprites, gui and so on that are on Defold’s side.