Instrument versus MIDI

Cubase
1

How does Cubase see and handle an instrument track versus a MIDI track? What would be the difference between me

a) adding Halion as a VST to my project, creating 10 MIDI tracks, and routing them all to MIDI channels 1-10 using the Halion VST

or

b) creating 10 Instrument tracks and selecting Halion as the Virtual Instrument for each track?

In the first approach, will I be able to select a different “instrument” for each MIDI track using just the one instance of Halion as a VST? If I were to combine the approaches, would I be able to effectively include more virtual instruments in my project? For example, if the version of Cubase I have allows for 16 MIDI tracks, and 10 Instrument tracks, could I combine the approaches to include 26 different virtual instruments in my project?

Thanks for the help.

2

Obviously with a) you only need to load 1 instance of Halion, whereas with b) you need to load 10 instances of Halion.

Theoretially yes, practically does it depend on your used Cubase version. Check the manual of whatever version you use, or simply try it