There has been a definite improvement. As an experiment, I added all 240 Tango tracks in Device Setup in N7 and N8.2. I then created a new, empty project in both (I had to add one track so that the FLS checker plugin could be loaded - SEE BELOW). In N7 there were 10 slots remaining and in N8.2 there were 28 remaining. I believe that these figures were helped by removing anything I don’t need from the C:\Components folder (ADR, 3Dconnectorski, vstconnect,euconadapter, DolbyAtmos and Reconform).
Note: Arturia’s Analog Lab 3 plugin apparently uses 43 slots - so goodbye to that one!
So things are looking better and hopefully Steinberg will be able to make some more progress on this in the fullness of time.
I am going to try to retain the 240 Tango tracks and keep an eye on the plugins I use, with fingers crossed.
This issue is not present on Apple Macs, but I just can’t see myself switching from PC at this stage of the game - too many as yet unknown complications will present themselves I’m sure.
‘twelvetwelve’ on this forum has developed a very useful, and free, FLS slot checker plugin. Insert the plugin on any track and it will report how many slots are still available to a project. This has given me much more information on what is actually happening. It shows how many slots each plugin takes. The inbuilt Steinberg plugins do not appear to use any slots (so I will be trying to use them as much as possible). UAD, Arturia and Izotope plugins use between 2 and 5 slots in the main, but only on the first iteration of each plugin - further uses of the same plugin on other tracks do not require more slots. Obviously, using six different UAD plugins would use a lot of slots.
Here is the plugin: