I made and used several of the unbuffered version back in the day. Used them mostly on my A1200, but also CD32, A500, and A2000. Never had any problems with the unbuffered version and never noticed any difference with the buffered version.
I also made a boot floppy that only had a few files on it and it initially assigned everything to the Zip disk and then took off from there. ie assign c: Zip:c etc. then when loadwb was called it loaded from the Zip.
Basically did the same thing you want to, using a parallel port Zip drive as a hard drive. Just had to have the floppy in the drive initally is all. Ah, the good old days :-)
