CC0 as different than any other CC is a misconstruction as pertains to current day and control of soft instruments. In the early days of MIDI these terms were defined according to hardware and particular specifications in builds. Most/Least Significant Bite does not have any intrinsic meaning for most software instruments or the control of.

IE: Synchron Player is not built for bank control*, I don't think. 

EG: CC64 is often called a 'switch controller'. But if nothing is translating values from the hardware device (one will read "0 is off, 1-127 is down", which is true except when it totally isn't), it's simply a continuous controller which may be used in place of any other CC.
I once totally believed that CC64 was a switch, because of the old connotation and because Cubase used to force everything entered into a CC64 lane to two possible values, 0 or 127 to visually indicate Off/On. I just found an old thread where I asserted that; it's incorrect. And discussions ensue as to a fancier sus pedal which may exploit the continuous control. Also confer CC4 in e. drum kits as a variable controller say for the hihat cymbals; writing this data in the DAW will entail dividing 0-127 into four zones corresponding to what's in the drum software (the hard-wired aspect in the physical controller notwithstanding).

*: VSL would have a non-trivial job [making SP into that kind of receiver] on their hands methinks.

"#2 (which we assume to use the exact same set of instruments/VEP instances, i.e. the same VEP7 server project, basically), I need to either load the plugin data from the song #2 DAW project (if I followed route (a) when saving) or load the respective VEP7 project"

All you need to do is launch the DAW project while VEP sits there. I can't tell what 'plugin data from the song #2 DAW project' refers to but it's not relevant. It's a very simple matter, the two [VEP vs DAW] are separate projects which may be connected. So, "Assuming that what I stated so far is really correct," - it isn't, so the questions after that point are moot.

"Now, if I want to mix my song #1 inside VEP7 (and not my DAW) and save that mix, I need to (a) save the VEP7 data into my DAW project (by "coupling" at least on the last save) or (b) save the VEP7 server project itself."

No. That is definitely not reason to couple the two, it's simply a matter of saving the VEP server project and saving the DAW project. It is not any standalone, it's just preserved (and decoupled) in order to not have it unload while you switch DAW projects, or to just close the one or quit. 

To my way of thinking there is no upside to coupling the two, a project will soon enough become unwieldy to save along with a DAW project, long, long save times, and this situation can become unstable.

You described having a license for Epic Orchestra (no '2.0') while the installation process regards one pertaining to Epic Orchestra 2.0.

I would run maintenance in elicenser and 'recover' first. You may want to see about a legacy version for the older key at elicenser website.

Normally to transfer licenses you drag and drop from one key to the other as you see it in the application. I can almost kind of vaguely remember a larger key.

The ports show in Cubase Inspector. Looks like this (links to pictures in new window):

PORT

I'm using 16 ports.

CHANNEL

VE Pro Server is what you connect to via the plugin in the DAW host, period. Other than that there is VE Pro Standalone, which connects to nothing.

"does VE 6.5 work inside of VE Pro server 7" - no, these are two separate applications. If you actually meant to leave off the Pro regarding 6.5, it used to indicate Vienna Ensemble in the pre-Pro version before supporting 3rd-party plugins was a thing (actually it would load Apple developer kit AUs). I haven't used it for 11 yrs so I haven't kept up with any changes.

The network thing has to be set to fixed and not dynamic IP. I don't know a lot about it, and have been using VEP as local host for some time anyway.

there are 3 iLok keys like that, but that's a different key altogether

There's just the one key, though. This 2 vs 3 is in your imagination.

 I think my only real answer is going to come from experience. I get that it's technically a fallacy to pre-pan given the Ambisonics and so forth. BFD3 in VE Pro for years now has a number ot things panned incorrectly and given the information you gave in-thread I think I'd have to try the output as an entity in MIR Pro rather than the combined bus. Fortunately I like the individually mic'd drums rather dry.

"Where can I look to start improving this?"

The audio interface designed well for low latency. I recognize all of that and for far too long was doing 1024 samples buffer in order to have things not badly falter. During most of these years I was under-specced to a degree where I was hesitant to say the least to throw money at the problem, and most of the claims and benchmarks are windows-centric and not even relevant, I'm a skeptic... but this year I spent $650 on the Quantum 2626 by Presonus. So now no matter what I throw at it my latency, set at 192 buffer gets me 8.5 ms roundtrip. I'm a poor tech writer so my explanation of why this is working isn't anything, but it uses a Direct Memory Access driver which takes a lot of load off the CPU.
Unfortunately I don't think it's going to be the same thing on your older machines, it leverages thunderbolt 3. I honestly don't know what is good or what isn't. I had an RME firewire interface with a MacPro 2009 model but while it was much better than the onboard audio drivers it was not what it's cracked up to be on windows.
But the quality of drivers on the audio interface is the biggest part of the solution. NB: I am working on one machine/local host, machine in my sig. Generally you need the muscle on the slave; me, I didn't lose much if anything by selling the  MacPro I used as master and doing it all localhost back then.

If you are experiencing bad bottlenecks (frankly that all sounds pretty normal to me) the cause is almost always some hardware not playing nice with the rest of the system. A video card, USB devices that aren't very well-designed etc.

I have 16. Then you set the channel, below this in the next dialog for the track.

I don't know of any reason to use "any/all" as an assignment with VSL. I use it with Kontakt sometimes with a multi and in the Key Editor assign channels to notes, so the track itself is omni and the multi as well. VI Pro et al are not multitimbral instruments like that.

They're there in the Inspector, click to assign to the instrument and the number of ports you have enabled is revealed.

picture

Delete the demo license from elicenser and do the Maintenence routine.

The design is to have different matrices have eg., your just intonation at the new tonic. So we switch to the matrix with that assigned, typically keyswitch but whichever.  There is no control over the tuning interface itself, and there can be only the one tuning per.

The only way to have two patches loaded is via the Slot Crossfade function (Advanced mode). There you bring in the secondary patch with a continuous controller, which defaults to CC 20.

You may wish to switch from one cell to the next or one dimension to the next using a CC, a key, speed, velocity or via a sequence map in that but there is no control via note duration I can see, so you'd set another condition to change it. EG: set the switch to velocity but use Velocity XFade for the subsequent dynamics.

It normally functions that we may hear it whether focused in eg., Cubase or VE Pro, yes, so something is wrong. I don't know what it is, sorry to say.

as to 2), hit the gear icon - 'edit' - ie., get into the Advanced interface and turn Bypass off there.

I don't see anything in 'Ctrl map' (Advanced mode) but it is possible to right-click that button and assign it to a key, so I imagine this occurred inadvertently and a key you're hitting in performance is doing it.

Point the standalone Synchron Player to the directories where the libraries reside. I didn't find Library Installer useful or to have any point I grasped here. In the standalone, go to the spanner preferences icon/Database...

Similar question regarding Imager Pro and MIR Pro: I'm using the former to correct some inexplicable panning issues (in certain BFD3 things), which it does about as well as anything will I suppose, but is this image unsuitable for MIR Pro by its nature? I have not needed it but I well may want it.

"To which I say, if there is self-learning artificial intelligence that can challenge any human,"
Thing is, there isn't.

never mind, useless to go into something so obvious

To the first question, no.

Per the second question, should be no but we don't know what host you're using. 
Cubase/Nuendo compensates sufficiently, if you checked ASIO Latency Compensation on by Default in Preferences/Record/MIDI.

Yep, that's it. It's unfortunate that it doesn't distinguish but looks to the general demo license and uses it up when there's a full license there.

VE Pro 7 tells me every start my MIR license is about to expire.
It's a full license. I have not activated any demo license of the software.

It may be this 48-hr all starts license is the culprit. I'll be back.

In a system with a lot of [realtime] latency (not necessarily a low-spec'd system, either), Cubase has a tendency to compensate VE Pro-hosted instruments to where notes land ahead of time. The lower you can get your buffers in Cubase the better, but if not possible this is a symptom. In Cubase's Studio Setup look at the 'Adjust Record Latency' and see about positive numbered values for this. It is what it is.

n/m