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I'm glad you brought this up because I forgot to, and it's my suspicion that this was the real reason they got a conservatorship instead of an adoption. My problem is that, when it comes to adults, the two things aren't comparable the way they are for minors. I dealt with one adult adoption when I had my own practice (they were friends I referred out; I didn't handle it myself). The wife had met the husband when the daughter was very young, and the wife was dodging an abusive boyfriend at the time. The husband raised the daughter like she was his own, and would have adopted her earlier, but that would have involved tracking down the bio father to terminate rights which would have created a whole hornet's nest. The couple was working class and relatively young so they weren't likely to have wills or really do any kind of estate planning. The adoption was largely symbolic, but it had the added benefit of making sure that she would inherit and be able to make decisions without a ton of estate planning on his part. I assumed at the time that that's what most adult adoptions were about.
Now compare that to a conservatorship or guardianship of an adult (different states use different terms). It gives the guardian complete control over one's affairs until the court terminates it. In Pennsylvania the court will appoint counsel for the proposed ward just to make sure that the guardianship is in his best interest. It's not something that's done unless someone has the kind of disability that makes it unwise to allow them to handle money or make important decisions. My sister-in-law has a mildly retarded sister who doesn't have a guardian. The process is so involved one of the reasons I pushed Powers of Attorney on practically everyone who came through my office was that it's a lot easier to appoint someone while you're of sound mind then have the court figure out who the best person would be. I'm honestly surprised the court went along with it in the first place. It's certainly not something done symbolically.
My impression is that they didn't want to do the adoption but told him that the conservatorship, since it's an analog of guardianship, is "like an adoption" so they wouldn't have to explain to him that, upon the advice of their attorney, they didn't really want to formally adopt him. It would certainly be an awkward conversation to have. They probably figured that they just wouldn't enforce it. Then Hollywood comes calling while he's away at college and they're authorized to make decisions for him so they make one on behalf of "the family" without explaining anything to him.Then the movie does well and 20 years later the kid finds out that the adoption was a sham and that some contracts were signed on his behalf without his full participation and they involved a lot of money "to most people" and, to top it off, they never filed annual reports with the court even though they're legally required to (though courts often overlook this requirement). So now he wants answers and has to go to court to get them, because at this point he doesn't trust his "parents" to tell him the truth.
We're also all engaging in a little bit of racism/classism in assuming that the white family knew exactly what they were doing at all times, while Oher was just along for the ride. I've known a lot of rich people who got really odd legal ideas in advice from a family lawyer who doesn't really know what he's doing. They might equally have been under the mistaken impression that the conservatorship was kind of like a half-adoption, or that it expired automatically, or any of a dozen other harebrained ideas.
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