Multi-texturing

Hi guys,

My objective is to have many (5 or so) textures mixed depending on some
information. Ways of doing it:
1 - Plot these textures on the screen with dynamic (software set) alpha.
2 - Use GLSL to multi-texture by passing the textures some matrix to guide
the mixing (no need to change alpha in every image in this case).
Any other way?

I thought and even have already a portion of it implemented in 1.2 SDL +
Opengl + GLSL. Though, using simple sprites seems easier to maintain (this
old code of mine also uses a lot of 3d stuff that I do not need now).

My question is:
1 - Can I do this same multi-texturing with simple blitscreen of images
with alpha and still get reasonable FPS? I read SDL 2.0 has some benefits
related to it.
2 - My access to GLSL is always through OpenGL, I cannot get to GLSL
through some 2.0 SDL interface, right?

Thank you for your attention,
zweifel