Yes, it would be interesting to support 2 moving gantries. In effect, each tool would be a separate CoreXY machine except that they would share the Z axis. We'd need to map the Y axis to the V axis on the second tool, and define the U and V positions as being defined by the U and V motors in the same way as X and Y. It doesn't sound difficult.
Yes, that is exactly what I'm thinking of! Time to start setting it up in cad then!
I still can't get my head around the mechanics of how this would work. I can't see how you could have the gantry's on the same plane without one interfering with the other. Unless, the gantry's are stacked one above the other? But then you'd have to somehow deploy one hot end to move in Z by the thickness of one of the gantry's. I just can't picture it in my mind - be interesting to see a design.
I am in fact working on a stacked gantry design but that's a just a way of trying to mount 3 extruders above a diamond hot end whilst keeping the footprint small and the Bowden tubes short. In this case, both gantries will be active at the same time and the second gantry would probably be passive - i.e. linked to the lower gantry but without any motors or belts of it's own.
Like dc42 said, I'm thinking of dual gantries. A bcn3d sigma for example uses one Y-gantry where two X-carriages live. Imagine instead two independent Y-gantries with one X-carriage each. Each gantry+carriage is controlled by its own set of steppers.