Try the freeze method, it’s fun 
You can even re-freeze tracks that now have MIDI data on them in order to make them audio-only. It’s great for large film templates.
I had an idea that might solve the VEP bussing issue for large projects – and that would be to create one VEP instance per instrument, then have them all aggregated into one metaframe. But, not sure if this would be an inefficient way of working CPU-wise. I mostly use Kontakt, and there is now no penalty for multiple instances of Kontakt vs. multiple instruments in one instance - I wonder if VEP works the same way. Only one way to find out I guess