All patch bays out there should be sporting TRS jacks, which means you could put a stereo signal through them, or balanced mono signals. Or unbalanced, for that matter. Most of my gear outputs separate unbalanced L and R jacks and I do not use a Y cable to combine them into one jack in my patch bay, I keep them separate. My advice is to keep every port mono for simplicity. Combining them to a single stereo jack seems like it would only be useful for saving on ports used, and if you need more it would almost be as inexpensive to just get a second patch bay instead of buying a bunch of Y cables/adapters. Certainly less messy. It can also make it easier to match the numbers on the patch bay inputs with the channel numbers on your mixer/interface.
On a related note, I found this software pretty useful for designing and printing labels. It has templates for what seems like every patch bay in existence. https://www.patchcad.com/
And on the topic of switching. I’ve never found a need to use anything but Normal. Plug in all your gear in a way that serves as a workable default routing. Top row is outputs, bottom row is inputs. Patch to override.