How obsessed are you with the size of the meat bird? Do they have to be that huge? You say you are willing to eat a spent hen, they aren't that large, much smaller than cockerels or roosters. Will you only be eating the cockerels that you hatch? What will you do with the pullets you hatch? If you are going to try to hatch enough for meat you will be overrun with pullets unless you eat them or sell them.
So you plan to feed eight people at a time. Dad kept a free ranging flock that had a lot of game in them, they were not that big. Mom could still feed a family with five kids in it from one chicken. If the chicken was young enough to be fried the choices on the platter included neck, back, gizzard, and liver. I don't know why she didn't cook the heart. There is a fair amount of meat on a neck and if it's breaded it's stretched even further. If it was an older hen chicken and dumplings is both a comfort food and a way of stretching the meat. Soup or stew stretched meat. Or you might package them in a way that better suits you. Maybe use four chickens for three meals. Or three chicken for two meals.
How set are you on breed? If you are going to be selling pullets instead of eating them purebred could help with sells and price. But if you are eating them what difference does it make?
The more different things you are breeding for the harder it becomes. I decided to create a colored egg laying speckled chicken, some red and some black, that was decent for meat and eggs and that went broody a lot. It took a few years but this is what I came up with.
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First I think you need to decide what your real goals are and how important they are to you. Size of the bird, color of egg shell, size and number of eggs, and whatever else you want. Then breed to those goals. I don't know where you are located, there are people on this forum from all over the world, so I don't know what options are available to you. If you are in the USA and don't care about keeping them purebreds, I'd keep the best rooster from what you have and get some Ameraucana females for the egg shell color and start breeding them. Always hatch colored eggs. In the USA I would not use Araucana, ours have a fatal gene that can kill a lot of chicks in the shell before they hatch. Araucana in other parts of the world may not have that gene. Or if you can find another colored egg layer that is bigger than the available Ameraucana use those. Choose the chickens that come closest to your goals for breeding stock. If you concentrate on a very few traits you can see results in very few generations. If you spread the traits out like I did it takes longer. You can always eat the ones that don't measure up.
If you want to stay with one breed do the same thing. Breed the ones you want to eat and eat the ones you don't want to breed. Pay attention to which hens lay well and breed those. You should see the results in just a few generations.
Hens and roosters both contribute to the gene pool for all traits, including size and egg laying. Roosters don't lay eggs so you don't know what they are contributing, but if you know how their mother laid you have a pretty good idea of what they probably have to contribute. You may need to make some trade-offs on hen size and egg laying.
My main suggestion, decide what you want and get started. Try to not be too rigid but be flexible. These things hardly ever work out exactly as you plan. Just do the best you can, it's hard to do better and that should be good enough.
