Haha. To be fair, the structure of Bane's story in Knightfall is really weird. He gets beaten by the second stringer, and never really gets a rematch against a Batman as his peak.
I love the feeling King adds to Bane's story. I do think it got a bit weird later on as the story structure changed (poor Bane, being the focus of a major Batman run for a second time, and still getting wiped out by story structure! )
That's a fair reading of Conquest, though I didn't think it was a chore, just kinda middle of the road.