Yeah I am doing the same with one kontakt instance and up to 16 instruments in it. All my maps are working with them now in 11 due to our workaround.
Regarding your question about VE PRO.
I’ve run VE pro locally and the only big advantage was having stuff loaded so that my sessions didn’t have to reeload up a ton of instruments every time. CPU wise though I’m not sure I can say VE pro is not going to change your life. I would highly recommend looking at how you can get a cheap refurbished PC of some sort and add a bunch of ram. I ended up doing this and it changed my life to have my libraries loaded on a server. I was so stoked that I bought two more.