I have been working on a database front end. The screen shot below is from my desktop, but it also runs solid at 60 fps on my old iPhone 5s (running 8.4.1 - so not benefiting from newer iOS improvements). The CPU usage on my phone settles around 42%, but draw calls are only 2% (and only 0.4% on my desktop when nothing is moving).
the bulk of the CPU usage is from the collision checks (12,000 a second) which is checking if the mouse is over a data line, and then highlights the line. If I turn that off, the collision checks go away, and the cpu usage drops way down on my phone.
Many of the 1146 objects on this screen are spritefont objects (over 800), so it obviously benefits from drawing the same object many times - although each object has different text to display. My eventsheet for this layout has 1,381 events at the moment - in dozens of functions. Code only gets called when needed. When nothing is happening there is almost no code running...
I use 6 layers, one of which forces its own texture, because it needs to mask out areas to make a scrollable pop-up window. So, for what I am doing, the engine seems to work very well.