You seem to be running n daemons on needs-editing-a-conf-server1..n and launching n clients on each of these, and "just" transporting the display(s) back to your workstation via x11 forwarding over ssh.
Henche - either run "redundant" daemons or suffer long-ish startup times.
How much resources does your typical long-running daemon consume?
He's using tramp to copy an auth key to the remote system, but then using that to allow the remote emacsclient to talk back to the host. Has some caveats, but it's essentially the single daemon, many remote clients approach?