I think the Kickstart at least needs to be loaded, so don't write it off just yet!
I've never owned a 1000, but speaking from experience with other Amigas:
-Only DF0: (the internal drive) is bootable (by default)
-Drives only light up when checking a disk
-The machine only polls for disk presence if trackdisk.device is functional (i.e., the system is not crashed). With no Kickstart, there's no trackdisk.device, and the simple boot ROMs in the 1000 may not know how to poll additional floppy drives.
