Sorry for the late reply. So, I incidentally think I found the same idea. I was attempting to play around with my ini files to learn how they work and I got my Development build to stop utilizing the nDisplay modules, acting exactly as if I had built for Shipping (default viewport and no waiting to connect to nodes).
With this, I suspect when building for shipping, passing command line arguments to tell the engine to run utilizing specific modules fails as maybe these are development commands only? So, this would mean the defaultengine.ini or userengine.ini or some other ini file needs to control this.
Regardless, I will attempt to perform this idea in the future, and if I can remember, post back on what I find.