I don't really disagree with you, was just meaning, at this junction to point out the problem with LogicPro, the reason the existing VSL multi-port templates are broken due to that LogicPro bug... and demonstrate a workaround using the ginormous multi-port template approach similar as what VSL did with them originally..
Here is a smaller way to work that may be preferable to you. Basically I packed up the multi-port functionality into a LogicPro macro, so the environment looks much less cluttered and you can easily copy and paste a couple of objects and wire up to VEP inst channel to add more ports as needed.
In this simple example, there is one VEP instance with 4 ports, 64 total midi channels feeding it.
By the way, even though you can define many articulation id's on a single track in LogicPro, you often will still need to put differnet articulations onto different slots in the instrument. So yes you want less tracks, but ultimately you still may need to get to more than 16 midi channels if you have more than 16 articulations for a particular instrument track.
Also if you simply want to keep your VEP instance-count down to less instances, then using multi-ports will be needed to do that.
(see downloads below)