I agree with Mandy's (aka damfino's) comment about it generally being best to get the best you can afford.  You tend to outgrow violins quickly in the early stages.

My personal opinion would be go for the Master over any of the others you mentioned, but that's simply my personal opinion based on what I think of the various models involved.

If you were unsure whether you wanted to do this, I might suggest the Apprentice. It's a remarkably good violin for the money. However, you don't sound undecided at all, so if the money is not an issue, I'd go with the Master.  Knowing what I know now, that's what I would have done back when I got my first one, but back then, I hadn't found the Fiddlerman site yet, so I didn't have that option.

I would recommend that you either get fine tuners on all four strings, or get the regular pegs replaced with geared pegs such as Wittners or Perfection Pegs. I prefer Wittners, myself, because they have a higher gear ratio (8:1) than the Perfection pegs (4:1). Tuning is quick and easy with geared pegs, if not traditional. I recommend them highly, but some of the stuff you've said hints that you might prefer tradition over ease of use.

Reading back over your questions - the better the quality of the violin at the start, the better it's resale is likely to be. Violins don't work like cars or circular saws, where they steadily go down in value. They either get more valuable as they get older (if they're made of good materials and sound good, because they tend to sound better as they age), or get less so (because age shows that they didn't make the cut).  In the lower end (and all the ones we're talking about are in the lower end), it's chance. The lower the value of the violin to start with, the greater the chance it's value will head downhill with age.  You're not going to see much change in 6 months. It takes a few years of playing before you start seeing if a violin going to start aging well, and a couple of decades before it starts being noticeable to people who aren't experts. (Most of the time, anyway.)  I would expect most instruments in this range will take a hit from being "used" for the first couple of years. If you get one that IS sounding better with age, that will change once people hear it.

However, Fiddlerman does offer fairly good trade-ins on their own instruments (better than on other brands), so if a couple of years down the line, you're looking to trade it in to get an upgrade from them, you'll almost certainly get a pretty good deal on it.  (Although if you get a Master, I wouldn't trade it in, myself. It'd make a mighty fine backup instrument.)