Create and write to a .pages file using Terminal

It's difficult to answer your question without more concrete examples of "all garbled." But the answer is probably "no, there's no one setting to make everything work out the way you want."

Since the two programs are very different, it's challenging to get a one-to-one correspondence of document formats when you export out of Pages to .doc format.

In general, my advice is that your exported .doc files will look closer to your Pages documents if you use Pages' Word Processing mode, rather than its Page Layout mode.

Mixing images with text, especially in a page layout fashion (with text wrapped around images and the like), is especially problematic, since the .doc format isn't as well suited as Pages for that sort of thing.

If you want your associates to see just what you are creating, you are probably better off to send them a PDF from Pages than to try to use .doc format. If they need to make changes/edits/comments to your work, I would suggest that you send them the initial text (without inline images) in RTF, then incorporate their changes into your Pages document by hand, then produce your final document in Pages and end up as PDF.

As you've likely discovered, touching a nonexistent file will create a zero-byte file with the name you specify. (touch is also used to update the modification time on an existing file. See man touch for further details.)

The problem you're running into is that though a completely empty file is valid HTML, text, or Markdown, it is not valid RTF—this is true of many file formats, actually, which are structured in a particular way and require some data to be present be valid.

Based on my experimentation, the bare minimum RTF file appears to be

{\rtf1}

If you'd like to create a blank RTF file from the shell, try this:

echo '{\rtf1}' >Foo.rtf 

Note the above will overwrite Foo.rtf if it exists.