That is correct, you cannot bully a larger node, but if you have several nodes available, it will protect the node from being bullied by the larger nodes until it has grown enough to bully all the other ones. For instance, if you get a smaller, but nice bright node, you can protect it from a few of the larger nodes you eventually want to feed it until it grows large enough to bully all the others. Then you don't have to babysit the node. Just place it inside an advanced stabilizer and be done with it.
As far as the amount of CV you need, I have found that a 3CV node (27 vis natively) is large enough to feed both the advanced alchemical furnace and an infernal furnace at the same time with ignis. Crystalizers can demand a lot of terra CV, but you rarely need more than 1 or 2 crystalizers. Everything else that can run off of vis doesn't have any competition, so you can get by with a very small node. You don't need to grow a node very large to be useful.
I've been growing a bright node I captured in the center of a 7x7x7 cube with 8 feeder nodes at the corners, and in the past 8 days, it has only fully consumed 1 node (which was an extremely tiny node--less than 25 total vis), and the largest single aspect has grown to almost 150. It has been stuck just shy of 150 for the past several days. The chance for it to grow is currently about 1/150 for each zap, so growth has slowed down quite a bit. I've been really tempted the last couple days of just calling it done and energizing the node. It's already much larger than I will ever effectively need.
