Several Software Serial Ports I am planning to use an Arduino (Nano ideally, or Other) to send and receive information from several software serial ports to other arduinos, over their available pins, ideally 8 ports.

I could understand an Asynchrounous Communication having one master and 8 slaves, with the master enabling communication from one port, receiving the data from that port, and then move onto the next port, into a sampling loop.

The SoftwareSerial library allows to set up the pins individually, and set the listen() port (thanks Juraj).

I read the AltSoftSerial library handle some of the limitations of the SoftwareSerial library, but I just realized the pins cannot be configured (without... cloning the full library?).

Question is: 


Option 1: Should I stick with the SoftwareSerial library?,
Option 2: Should I try the AltSoftSerial library, and figure how to duplicate it (i think this is a NO)?
Option 3: Understand that none of these libraries are prepared for this, and seek for other alternative?
Option 4: It is pointless to have several serial trunks in Arduino, if only one will work at a time, and should hence try to arrange just one serial trunk?
I tried to use MIDI (which is quite slow: 31,250 bps), and that didn't work reliable with the software serial on the Arduino Uno. Since I wanted multiple ports, I switched to the Arduino Mega which has FOUR harware serial ports. I would suggest this above using so many software serial ports; it also will relieve your processor to use hardware serials.