My hopes were crushed...

I find conduit's placement on the tree odd. It's most easily accessible through the pure intelligence part of the tree, where as if you make a conduit character you probably want to be using at least two kinds of charges. I would imagine endurance and frenzy charges would the best of the two to specialize in for a conduit character since the power ones are mostly wasted on non-critical hitters. Also, you can't really get power charges at the moment, although I'm sure that will change at some point.

I realize that it needs to be on the center ring due to it being attractive to characters taking any combination of the much further out charge nodes, but the center ring is still large enough that moving around it takes a fair amount of points. I realize there's no perfect place to put conduit in the middle ring, but placing it as close to the middle of the intelligence part as you can get seems odd to me.

Hmm it might indeed be to easy to give every minion 3+ charges of each.

What would people think of minions being capped to 1 charge max if conduit was allowed to affect them?

It would be just kind of confusing for players. It should either effect them or not.

If they want minions to be able to be effected by power charges, but not through conduit, it can be done through the addition of uniques or other passive/active skills.