Conduits almost seem like they were implemented by a handful different people who were not communicating and had a VERY different philosophy on how to obtain rewards.
First off we have specific sources. Conduits coming from a spicific type of content or drop source within that content. In this case the rank of the content or power is based on the difficult of the content. This falls under the raid teams reward philosophy “do the hardest content get the best rewards”.
Next we have random conduits. This drop from calling boxes, world quests, the Korthia weekly, and the covenant assaults in the maw bi weekly. Some conduits don’t drop from dungeons, raids or PVP and come from this or the fallowing source. This conduits have there item level tied to your characters renown via the “World Quest Item level upgrade” renown benchmark. This benchmark increase the minimum and maximum but never reaches the level you can get from dedicated content or the fallowing source. These again fallow the formers reward philosophy except for the fact that some of these conduit may be your BIS so regardless you can’t get them to the max even if your are clearing Mythic raids or achieving Gladiator rank in PVP.
Lastly we have grind conduits. This is were any form of reward philosophy goes out the window. To get some random conduits to there final ranks you will need to grind a reputation or as of 9.1 Torghast. These conduit upgrades are unlocked via a reputation then need to be purchased with a currency. In 9.0 this was beyond grindy and once you finally got the reputation up you would then be treated by being able to get around 2 conduits a week while simultaneously being discouraged form saving the currency to buy said conduit upgrades though round-able gameplay systems. After 9.0 this was replaced with a system that has you scavenger hunt for items thought a zone on a daily basis via killing “rares”, looting chest and other stuff in a some how more tedious method of grinding reputation to eventually be able to buy conduit upgrades. Thankfully this time you can save the currency without the game otherwise discouraging you. As for Torghast well technically it isn’t a huge grind on paper but in practice it is. To clarify while you are technically able to get the conduit upgrades relatively quickly after upgrading the “box of many things” your chances are significantly lower then if your continue a long drawn out grind of running torghast on repeat to farther upgrade the box to make your more effective in torghast so you can do higher layers to get flawless on those layers so you have a better chance at getting a conduit upgrade which is still not guaranteed and after all that… you can only get on a week… OH MY gosh 
If your to really boil that down it is “do torghast to do more torghast to do more toughest so you can improve you chances to get something once a week” Now to make it all worse is anyone from any corner of the game who wants to upgrade conduits or keep current on even a main is sort of strong armed in to doing this. While the conduit upgrades do only account for a slight throughput increase they are still power increases. This sort of ties in to that idea that the there is a portion of the WoW dev team that is just scared to death at the idea of a player being done with a character with a relatively reasonable amount of time after a patch launches and releases all its features. The thing is this goal posts for things like this are so far out more players are just not doing it anymore.
To farther compound this already convoluted system we have the “conduit catchup” tokens you get from Korthia which are kind of like a bait for those who don’t understand how the system works or how to make the most out of them. Rather then having Soultwigning crescents simply set a random conduit up to a specific rank they just increase your lowest one by one rank, it selects random (now based on spec but still random) if its a tie which it eventually is. So someone uses it when they have conduits around item level 184 and it puts one up to 200 but then they increase there renown and get that same conduit at 213… They have just wasted there random upgrade token.
This system has no redundancies, the game doesn’t teach you how the over all conduit upgrade system works despite how convoluted it is. In all honesty they need to strip the system of ranks completely and have the conduits base power be determined by player item level benchmarks. If I am 227 have them set to 226. One I reach 239 set them all up to 239. Keep empowered sockets the same and just make everyone unlock each conduit once when they reach level 60.
Don’t do another one of these reps. Revamp the system have conduit unlocks and upgrades be simple and straight forward. There is no need for this overly convoluted system with in all honestly wastes a very large amount of time for a reward that is not worth it by the time we get it.