I'm typically seeing between 8 and 12 instances. It hasn't been an issue, but I asked about it at PAX and they seemed genuine about (a) knowing that it looks crappy, (b) investigating a fix.
Correct. Each panel have own renderer process. You can read why following link in my signature. When you in-game there is always 32 instances.
I doubt it's any different on OS X, but who knows might be Coherent developers put some other limitations here. Though @wondible didn't say that he have less views / processes so I doubt there is such difference. PS: Also just to clarify as "in-game" I mean when you spawned on planet. Before this happen process number will be less than 10.