Hi Craig,
Sorry just saw this. Lots of youtube videos on templates for VSL . Anne Kathrin Dern has some.
VEP does a great job of resource management and all your samples are loaded up and ready to go. I find I can reference a lot of instruments in VEP from S1 and still record audio without a lot of latency or S1 crashing. If S1 does crash everything is still loaded in VEP so you're up and running again fast. VEP also loads up MIR if you have it and once you get the routing figured out, wow.
There's no way of getting around the fact that building templates is time consuming though. Reminds me I have to add in my Synchronized Special Edition samples,