Well, I never saw someone saying you need to give a s**t about this stuff when you're doing the hybrid epic thing. They're usually referring to realistic sounding mockups that could later be played live by a normal sized orchestra, maybe even in the concert hall. You need to pay attention to a lot of things to achieve that. DJ composes more from a sounddesigners perspective I would say, which means: Whatever sounds right is right. So crank up that col legno +12db while Horns a12 with fff are playing, just because it sounds awesome. But the forum chatter is useful to learn what's possible live, and what isn't.

VI Control is great but you almost need a warning label of the pretentious and useless people and topics to ignore. There are some great people there willing to teach, give feedback, and try to be positive (I've learned a ton!) - but it's kind of sunk under the veneer of a retail therapy group for sample library buyers now.

I know right? That’s how I started was just doing what felt natural, and my music sounded way better than when I tried to follow all the rules.

The latter is more resource friendly, because every empty instance of Kontakt takes up roughly 60mb ram. But 0 if you disable the track. But your template file gets big if you have many disabled Kontakt instances, for example my template has around 1500 disabled tracks and the file size is 600mb. But I don't think CPU is an issue in this case. I'd go with the many instances of Kontakt approach because if you're into sounddesign it gives you more freedom with processing.