poly~ as vst host?

I think I've been labouring under a misconception - perhaps you guys could set me straight.

My patch takes x/y/z data from a boids external and pipes it to two synth instances. It got cpu expensive so I decided to try poly~ to share synths across my two processors, However, after several days of reading and trying I am stuck with two questions:

1. I would like to initialize my synths with different presets in poly~. Currently I can use the args attribute to initialize with any preset, but then all the encapsulated poly patcher instances are initialized with the same preset. I'm trying to get to 'instance 1 initialized with preset x' 'instance 2 initialized with preset y' etc. Is this even possible?

2. The boids external generates a constant stream of position data for each boid, though I'm only listening to two. The first poly~ instance receives, interprets and plays this data from one boid fine. I can send poly~ a target message and route the input data between instances with no problem. However I would like to use target to always send boid1 and boid2 data to poly~ instance 1 and 2. But no luck instance2 remains inactive, perhaps the target messages are too rapid. Here's a sample...

Any ideas would be really appreciated, many thanks