Thanks for the warm welcome DJ Vintage,
I think the slow transision root from VDJ to Serato that you described is the path I,m going to take.
I,m lucky in that I have a small purpose built music/recording room so while I am hopefully getting to grips with the controller I can leave it set up with VDJ in my room. You are correct that the DDJ-SR can be mapped out to use VDJ and the maps are already available online I believe.
The other question you asked regarding if I have only been using laptop only is yes, although back in the day I used to own a DAC3 which I used with PCDJ, but when I changed software to VDJ the controller never made the journey with me.