How to make panels with a node reference argument
I implemented a similar feature on my site: when a user registers, several nodes of different content types are created specifically for that user.  I also use Panels.

To (somewhat) easily link the content with the user, I used the Relation module, which integrates with Rules.  After I created the content upon account registration, I created relations between the user and the content (all using Rules-- if you do this, you'll need to make a rule set and create the content in one rule before creating the relations in a following rule; otherwise, you'll get some weird errors).

Then, without using Panels contexts, I simply created content panes in Views that pull in the content by adding relations (from the Relation module) as relationships (in the Views UI).

The challenge of this approach is that setting up rules to fetch the relations and loop through them is pretty complex.  It might be easier to use the Entity Reference module, which has Rules integration, but when I was building my site a year ago it was broken so I used the more complex Relation module instead.