Pete,
I haven't lost too many fish once they were hooked. I usually end up having the fish with one treble in his mouth, and another in this gill plate or something. Maybe that's a disadvantage to removing the middle treble. With all three trebles on there, the fish doesn't have much of a chance of coming unbuttoned, but it is a pain to deal with all those trebles once you get the fish to the boat.

I was thinking about how to further modify the fastrac minnow. Here's a couple ideas- Have you seen those new red treble hooks? I think they're made by Daiichi or X-Point. Try switching out the front or middle treble for one of those and it may resemble an injury to the fastrac and trigger more strikes. On like the Florida flats and stuff they put one red treble hook on the jerkbaits to make it look like it's bleeding or injured.
Another thought that would take a lot of time and engineering would be to take off ALL the trebles and remove the things that the attach to. Then try to construct a tail to put on the back, maybe cut one off of a possum lure or something, and rig a single hook on the top of the lure. Then add suspend dots to the belly until it sinks really well. Twitch it along the bottom and it's sure to catch halibut. I've tried fishing it across the bottom with an egg sinker over a swivel (carolina rigging...) but I think the egg sinker just pisses them off and scares them away since it's so close to the lure. So, there's a couple things the think about.
-Brian