Suction hole

[d4rk3lf]

On thing, I might want to improve is, that the stream is a bit narrow around path. How to make a bit more offset variation?

Try adding spread operator bellow Path Follow. 

Then another. I keep getting bluescreens due to running out of memory when exporting the system as tycache. Any ideas for reducing memory usage?

Maybe export 2 Tycaches? 
Make particle count twice lower, cache it, change a seed, cache it again. 

Not sure if it will work for your scene, but sometimes you can cache something like 1/10% of the particles. 
Import cache into a new Tyflow with Birth Flow, and Flow Update operators. 
Then bellow it, add a spawn operator (spawn once (by default), but 10-15 particles). 
And finally, spread operator to spread them out randomly.