Sounds to me like you guys are essentially spamming the search engines. I'm not judging, but at this level there can't be much expectations for high quality, and there doesn't need to be.

Automation is key here. You guys aren't going to design and create great content for 1000 websites. Automate, automate, automate.

You guys are handling your designers wrong. Don't tell them anything. Just ask for x number of fast and flexible designs. If they don't want to follow your instructions, then cut them and find others. You aren't building works of art here.

If possible I would have a developer code something which could take inputs for layouts (CSS and HTML,) color combinations and some other elements such as backgrounds and use that to generate 10,000 sites if you need to. What you are really looking for here is to have a decent look but also to keep your sites clear of foot prints which Google can follow. Your generator could also change up things like class / div names. In this case all the designers would be doing is helping gather the inputs and put together the layouts. Actually, you wouldn't even need much in a designer putting together layouts if you were to use a framework such as Blueprint, which already comes with command line tools you could leverage.

I know people who could build 1K sites (and profitably) in a week using the above methods with no help from others. You just need the right software tools for the job. Go hit up the communities of people who are actually good at this stuff and ask them. ;)

The less overhead, the easier it is to be profitable. It's similar to the idea of domaining. Buy a domain and it only has to pay for the ~ $7 / year purchase and the server it's sitting on. Info's are less expensive at as low as 79 cents per domain but they don't do as well with the search engines as com's.

If all else fails, quit and do this on your own if you are really that interested in this sort of thing. I don't think these guys really know what they are doing anyways.