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Also maybe consider capping your framerate at the lowest acceptable setting to avoid slowdown, I'd rather play at 17fps with no slowdowns than 25 fps if it missed even the occasional frame.
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Yes, for an action game a steady frame rate is a must. Right now the frame rate is capped to 25 FPS I think. But I noticed that actually the demo speed starts at 17 FPS on an A500, and not 25 FPS as I thought. So when it now runs the fastest, with just a few enemies on screen, that's actually 17 FPS. But the 16 color prototype starts at 25 FPS. And A1200 too can run the 32 color version at 25 FPS.
And drawing the bigger boss enemies with "Block" is indeed a good way to speed things up. And if Block isn't possible, then the other option is to drop the frame rate during the boss fight, that is still better than slowdown.
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Although I think that a real "bullet hell" would need 50 FPS, or at least a very steady 25 FPS in order to look legitimate. And sprite multiplexing is the only way to achieve that on Amiga, and only one game has really done it at 50 FPS (Mega Typhoon).
But of course many of the best arcade shmups are not bullet hells; games like Varth, Grid Seeker and 1941 don't have that many bullets on screen, and with an engine like this, I would imagine that they could run at a steady 17 FPS at least, and surely so on an A1200, if not on an A500.
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And also for other game types this drawing system could work very well. For example in a Red Alert style RTS, where hundreds of tanks need to be drawn every frame; something like this is surely the right way to do it, and slowdowns wouldn't matter so much.
And also 2D based pseudo 3D shooters, like Space Gun, Death Mask and Backlash, for these kind of games too it would make sense to draw the whole display every frame. If fact I have speculated that this would be the right way to make a fast first person shooter on the A500; do things like in Death Mask, but on full screen, faster, and with better animation and controls. And in a 1st person shooter even 17 FPS looks smooth.