I'm pretty sure that Steam Workshop isn't a good place to publish mods right now (unless they've fixed the Downloading issue, though I've heard no word on that).
That being said, my attempt at making a mod that modifies the Companions starting stuff had mixed results.
First, my mod:
http://www.mediafire.com/download/u1q781m9oek51np/Companion_Mod_Test.zipThe good news was that the changes I made in Character.txt worked (though the values were incremented by two)
The bad news is that somehow every single skill in the game got messed up. Staff of Magus became a Flare/Burning Blaze, Midnight Oil became a Fireball, etc etc. The companions *did* get the skills I assigned them though, even if they immediately lost them upon joining due to them not having the required skill level for it.
More testing is needed, but I'm inclined to say that messing with Jahan/Madora's starting skills might not be such a good idea. Most likely they need to have the same number of skills (5); in my mod above I just limited them to two starting skills.