Seth, I think the size of the mating nuc, if that is strictly your question, is irrelevant (unless wasp predation is a concern).

What does seem to matter is how well fed queen larvae are, and how early in their development as a larvae they are lavishly fed.

And of course, who her mama was....

I have been running a deliberately low-tech queen improvement program for three years now. For several reasons I wanted to come up with an easily replicated template for use by any individual/group/club. Some of the BEE-L regulars were my advisors (in particular Jerry, who was my Master Beekeeper prof, and Randy, who is just so darned good at answering pesky emails).

Putting aside all the factors that go into making ripe queen cells of promise, the University of Guelph has a bunch of wonderful videos on their beekeeping, presented by their head beekeeper Paul Kelly. In the videos on queen rearing you will see they use the tiny mini-mating nucs that have three 3" frames and take only a cup or two of bees to stock. They have an integrated feeder as well. Nifty little things. 

While they are best suited to an operation like UGuelph's, in which one has at one's disposal a small but devoted staff of graduate students, I found the mini's worked very well. The queens flew and mated, no problem and came back at an excellent rate. Note: I have local support in generating quantities of quality drones, so I think most of the ladies get out and git 'er dun in one mating flight.

The big drawback is timing. When HRH (Her Royal Highness) returns, you do not have much time before she gets down to business and lays up her tiny frames. You really need to be spot on in finding her ASAP once she's back and laying. This takes time and labour because in my locale I do find the ladies a bit spotty about return times. While you should find her back and laying about two weeks after putting the 10-day-from-grafting ripe cell into the mating nuc, some take up to a week longer.

But in short, the mini's are not holding nucs, so you have to visit them a lot. 

In my apiary I need to work more efficiently than that so I prefer at least a standard nuc as a mating nuc, if not 5 frames of bees in a 10 frame setup. Three reasons:

1.  If the ripe cells (I put two in each mating setup so the workers can choose which is best) go into a 10 frame setup stocked with 5 frames of bees, the queen when she does return mated has a big enough work force to raise all the brood she lays, which means I can evaluate her fecundity with more accuracy.

2. I get to skip the step where I move her from a mini mating nuc to a colony....she's already in a colony.

3. If I do this in midsummer, the mating nuc has time and resources enough to make winter size by winter wrap up date...which is critical because I have to proof the queens I raise. I want them to overwinter and I breed next year from those who do that best (there are other criteria but that is the critical one).

Just as an aside, you really don't know whether you are breeding good queens, let alone better queens, unless you proof them yourself.  That means running them over winter and into the next season to evaluate (in my case): strength of the overwintered colony in spring, speed of spring buildup (important on the PacNW coast as our one big honey flow is early June: not much time to meet that date), and honey haul....under similar management.

As for what queens are worth in any century...I went into this shocked that queen prices were on the rise and this summer were about $CAN60 for any queen at all, no proofing and no guarantees. After rearing them myself, given the work and chancy nature of the craft, they should cost triple that!

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