Mendoza spring: making the first nucs of the season — raise my own cells or buy queens, and how many frames each?

Mendoza, seventh year, 24 colonies, and spring is properly here. The stone fruit is finished, colonies are on eight to ten frames of brood, and the first swarm cells have appeared in two hives, which is my signal to start making increase rather than reacting to it. Plan: make eight nucs over the next fortnight from my four strongest colonies, four frames each — one frame of emerging brood, one of pollen and stores, one drawn empty and one foundation — plus a good shake of bees. Half get a bought mated queen, half get a cell from my best colony. Uncertainties. Four frames or five? Five builds faster and is more forgiving of a mistake, but eight five-frame nucs takes more resource than my four donors can spare this early. And with the queen cells, mating here in early spring is reliable enough in a warm year but I've had two rounds in past seasons where the weather closed in and I ended up with drone-layers three weeks later. How do you balance it? And is there an argument for making all the nucs now with cells and only buying queens for the ones that fail?