This got me going. Thanks! proenv.bat was the missing link I needed.
Upon doing a conda install ... and resolving the dependencies, I discovered the likely reason my package wasn't listed in default repositories: it resulted in having to downgrade one of the built-in packages! Luckily, so far, this doesn't appear to have messed anything up for me in my clone environment.
Regarding "need" vs "nice," this definitely falls under the nice category. My project is to author a tool that creates a PDF packet containing a formal letter with an attached map, based on user input. My thought was to utilize a company letterhead template we have, versus recreating it from scratch (The python-docx package allows for manipulation of Microsoft Word documents). However, the template is fairly simple so it won't be too cumbersome to just code it using reportlab or something similar.