Heh, newt is right, the feature actually already exists: just use a large sprite and make your first condition "is overlapping sprite". That will efficiently reduce the list of instances to run the rest of the event on.
Sure, you can make a test with 10,000 objects and measure all sorts of performance differences, but have you ever actually measured it making a difference to a real-world game? Most games use far fewer instances. Of all the projects I've ever debugged or profiled, people usually run in to GPU performance limits (a hardware limit) before CPU limits. I guess there are some special cases where a game really does involve 10,000 objects, but that's generally the exception, and then there are ways of reordering conditions to efficiently reduce how many instances you're testing against - e.g. using the overlapping sprite trick.