+1 on the Track Templates, they save me hours and hours over time - looks like magic when you create and populate a largely empty new project in front of someone.
With a few mouse clicks, I get a track folder, an audio track for each drum kit piece, a drums midi track, and an instance of Battery 3 - with a loaded custom kit where each kit piece is sent to its own audio output channels.
While the ability to specify the number of outputs to set up as part of the Insert Soft Synth dialog box might be helpful, wouldn't that only save you from having to use a single extra mouse click to launch the Insert Multiple Tracks dialog box? (I may well be missing additional considerations here, so I am posing an honest question here).
To be quite honest, for multi-timbral synths, which is what this request is about, I do use the Insert Multiple Tracks dialog box to insert both audio tracks and midi tracks for a given instance of such a synth, like Kontakt. It gives me the ability specify the number of both audio and midi tracks to insert for the synth instance, and also lets me choose what synth port to assign any inserted midi tracks to.
Anyways, that's what I do.
Bob Bone