I totally agree with you on the AI. Just about everyting was incorrect with respect to Gig Performer. for other things it’s pretty good at but certainly not anything related to GP 
Very well, I’ll follow the paradigm. In previous bands it really didn’t concern me but this heavy 80’s synth oriented stuff caused me to panick. I appreciate everyone walking me off the ledge
I play in a couple of synth heavy 80 bands. In some ways, it should be less stress ram-wise because you should mostly use physically modeled synths (V Collection, Cherry Audio, etc), which have a small ram foot print (as opposed to big sample libraries, which are often a better option to emulate acoustic instruments).
I play in a band in Spain where we play all styles of music, from rock to bachata, merengue, Spanish classical and folk to 80s dance or modern disco music, so I have to access an infinite array of sounds.
I have found that the best result for me is to have all repeated sample based instruments in global (piano, strings, accordion, pads… pads is a synth but it’s repeated so many many times, etc etc, I decided placing it in global). These, I mute when not needed. I also have all the eqs for these sounds in global but I control then from local.
I also have all reverbs and various effects on global.
All other Synths and one-off instruments go in local because, as they have said in previous posts, Synths use a minimum amount of RAM so you can load hundreds in local without running out…