You asked for thoughts so I'll give you some of mine.
As far as mushy, texture, flavor, taste, in my opinion, all that is acquired taste, personal opinion, what you are used to. We all have our own opinions and preferred tastes and none matter but your own.
I don't know how many chickens you are talking about or what your set-up is or is planned. I'm doing about what you are talking about. You can see my selections in my signature. In a couple of years I plan to have only mutts and not keep pure breeds. A great quantity of eggs per hen is not that important to me. I figure if I keep 5 to 7 hens and 1 rooster, I'll get plenty of eggs for me and my friends and plenty of hatching eggs, even with below average layers. Not that I am actively selecting against good layers, just that it is not my top priority. All things equal, I am selecting for the better layers. I just started with my chicks this spring, so I am still in my initial culling phase.
My top priority is to select for meat. That just means I eat the slower developing smaller ones first.
I have eaten a few of my chickens. I find the meat does have more "texture", there is less meat overall, and there is less white meat than dark meat as compared to the store chickens. Just be aware. Also, if you pluck the chickens as opposed to skinning them, the darker chickens do have darker pin feathers that are less appealing than the white chickens. When new feathers are coming in, the Black Australorps especially have a black "ink" in the feathers coming in that looks really disgusting. No big deal to me as I handle it while processing and wash them well, but it might bother some people. That is why white birds are selected for the commercial market. It's not that white birds produce more meat; the carcass looks better.
As I see it, you have a few different options. You could just get dual purpose birds of whatever breed(s) you want and selectively breed them as you will, about like I am doing.
You could select a breed of hens, say white rock for the better looking carcasses, and run two roosters with them, say a white rock rooster and a Cornish rooster. Not sure which color of Cornish rooster would work better. I'm pretty sure you will know which chicks are pure white rock and which are Cornish crosses pretty soon. You then just eat all the crosses and as many of the pure breeds as you desire. One possible disadvantage to this is that the eating and pooping habits of the crosses versus dual purpose are quite different. You might have management issues.
You could run two separate flocks, one with the dual purpose chickens for meat and eggs, and the other for the meat birds, using a dual purpose rooster with one flock and a Cornish rooster with the other.
If you are using hatchery chickens, don't expect your homegrown Cornish crosses to be the same as the commercial Cornish crosses. Hatchery chicks are not selectively bred for that as well as the commercial birds. They will still be a lot more like the commercial crosses than the dual purpose chickens will.
There are other possible scenarios you could come up with. Hopefully this will give you some starting points for your chicken journey. Enjoy the ride.
