Welcome to the forum!
About the conductor you are not missing anything.
The 2 is basecally only interresting if you want to be vintage correct. If you donīt need that, get the 4. If you just wanne use the regular 3 pos (bridge, bridge/neck parallel, neck) option you only need 2 wires so you just tape the other two out of the way, no biggie. But if you wanne get into coilsplitting and the like you unchain those two and have a go (I can only recommend splitts).