3 frames are definitely preferable to 2, and adding brood and two 32-ounce drink cups of bees seems to help. The rest of the possible setups depends on your situation. If you have lots of bees to donate, make full 10-frame splits and put a honey box above it if the flow is still on. Just making increasers? Make up 5 -frame nucs early in the season - a good year they will go up to a full box or 2, a poor year they should still over-winter if fed. Mating the queens and increasing early? Make 3-frame nucs and feed them.
Yes, you can conserve bee resources and split them real thin like 1- or 2-frame mating colonies, but this makes the division of labor in the hive very stringent - not enough of anything getting done, so the colonies grow very slowly and may miss out on a lot of the nectar flow for the year, making wintering very "iffy".
I consider 3 a minimum in very good conditions for colony growth, and I feed them. A double nuc box and 4 frames + a feeder frame works out pretty good in 10-frame boxes, as do double nucs in 8-frame box equipment.
Almost all my 10-frame Langstroth boxes have 3 vertical slots down the inside of the short (16 1/4") ends. I add hive partitions made of 1/4" ply, make up special bottoms and narrow inner covers. I can run 3 x 3-frame mating arrangement, 2 x 5-frame double nuc arrangement, 7 + 3-frame queen isolation arrangement for my breeder queens, or full 10-frame box arrangement. Any box, any use. The drawback - gotta make lots of narrow inner covers (3-frame size and 5-frame size), and you need LOTS of corks!
I don't like 4-way mini mating nucs because of having to draw out the mini frames. It can delay the start of queen season, plus the results are not as consistent.
Good luck.