The first thing you can certainly do is start on the design of it all. Assume you are building a complete real-life cockpit and make a list of the controls required. Then decide which ones you really need and which you don't, subtract the amount of axes covered by your stick/HOTAS set and you can have a rough estimate of the amount of axes you will need.
After that you will still need to wait for the game and see how it implements things (if it does implement everything), but it will be much easier to subtract controls from an already designed layout than add extras to one.
While i do suggest only working on the design while waiting for the game before you buy anything, there is one thing you can buy right from the start and that is the interface board. I haven't made any custom controllers myself but a friend of mine i recently got back into flight simming has modified his old saitek X35 from gameport to USB by rewiring it through a Bodnar BU0836 chip, plus he added an improvised trim wheel as well. There are other boards on the market with which i am not familiar, the BU0836 just seems to be the most popular probably due to the large amount of controls it can support (8 axes, 32 buttons and a POV hat).
As to the question of prop pitch controls, if flying aircraft with either a constant speed propeller (rotol or dehavilland equipped Spits/Hurris) or a manual variable pitch control (early 109s) you can use a single control in both cases. The only difference is that when flying a CSP equipped aircraft you will be able to set RPM by moving the lever until the RPM gauge is where you want it and let the prop governor maintain that on its own, while in the case of a variable pitch non-CSP aircraft you will need to constantly adjust it to maintain it yourself: the same control slider will in the first case work as an RPM-to-maintain selector, in the second as a direct manipulator of prop pith. That's exactly how it works in real life as well, so you will also have a realistic simulation of it all.
For fixed pitch propellers (tiger moth) you won't need it at all. For two-stage props (early Spits/Hurris) you might be able to use a workaround instead of having to map a separate toggle switch. In IL version 4.10 the Italian SM79 bomber was introduced, which uses two-stage props. The way they modeled it is that anything from 0% to 50% pitch corresponds to the cruise (lower RPM) setting, while 51% to 100% corresponds to the take-off/max power (high RPM) setting. I'm guessing here but i would imagine a similar capability will exist in CoD, especially if we can manually select zones of the slider's movement for discreet commands.
In such a case, you would be able to just use the same axis for prop pitch control even in aircraft with two-stage props: moving the lever below half travel would switch to the low RPM setting, moving it above the halfway mark would switch to the high RPM setting. Also, such a function could come in handy for people who use throttles with detents, as they could set the exact zone for WEP and so on.
All in all, a lot will depend on how the game interface is laid out. However, i wouldn't expect to see separate control bindings for each propeller type. Since each aircraft type only has one type of props fitted (eg, you won't see a multi-engined bird having half the engines on CSP props and the other half on manually variable pitch props, they will all use the same system), the same physical control could be used for all, that is, the lever would be mapped to prop control but how that control is effected in the game would depend on the kind of prop the aircraft has.
Finally, it's not uncommon for modern flight sims to have multiple control profiles, so we may be able to have customized controls on "a per aircraft type" basis.
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