If recovering costs as early as possible is the primary concern then I'd do it exactly like Old Pullman does it. Except I'd answer the phone. Rail and wood ties are cheap. With jigs, switch building goes fairly fast. No detail items.
Injection molding is prohibitively expensive and would definitely require a very very large number of sales to just break even on the investment but detail can be built in. I once priced having a mold made for some switches and the quote was anywhere from $8000- $15000 a mold. If you could design and machine your own mold, you'd be ahead of the game big time in money. The actual plastic injection part is cheap. An alternative method for molds is to not use hot injection molding but rather resin casting. You can make your own molds for cheap but it takes longer to make each one.
The other option that I could think of would be to build a very accurate and highly detailed switch that would be a true scale model but the price would be very high and the only people that would probably pay for them would probably just build their own anyways.
In terms of having only 1 size switch in L/R, you wouldn't want it to be a curved switch or a Y. You also wouldn't want a very long switch. I'd say a #4 or a #6. As for which rail code, if you designed it well it wouldn't be hard to use either code 125 or 148.
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