Cycling is king.
Although Shelters help, you still run the risk of a bad collision when Steward + Swindler is already in the deck. The faster reshuffling from Sage, and the ability to play Swindler more often, makes it the better choice in my opinion. Turn 4 is too early for Conspirator, it's jumping the gun for the payload.
Note MicQ's strategy isn't trying to hit $8 very fast with Conspirators, it's trying to get a very thin deck with good cycling to make Horn of Plenty good, then go for a City piledrive + Knights pin. Uncontested, that should beat trying to build up with Conspirator. In the linked game, it actually works incredibly well - the Cities gained from HoP are enough to play Knights almost all the time, and the HoP also give extra gains to win the Knight split. After WW's turn 12 he has very little change, after Mic's turn 13 it's essentially over because it's 3 Knights to 0.