Logic Pro loses external MIDI instrument settings on import

In Logic Pro for Mac, importing an external midi instrument loses its midi settings.

I am using an Erae 2 controller. I made a project that has 8 external midi instruments, each set to a specific midi channel for that controller (channels 1-8). These in turn are in a summing stack. Everything works exactly as I intended. I saved this project as both a template and as a project.

Now I want to work with that controller in a different project. Since I have it all set up, I thought I would import the Erae controller instruments (with empty tracks) into the new project. Everything works as expected, except: The imported tracks have none of the midi settings. So in the original Erae project one track would be set to Erae 2 as the midi source with channel 1 as its channel, but when imported those are set to the defaults (any). I have tried every permutation of import settings that I can think of and nothing seems to retain the source and channel info. While not a huge deal to rebuild the midi tracks, it seems like this should work? Am I doing something wrong? Any good workarounds? Thank you!