That's a good point, at steady-state, I'd imagine unbuffered channels would have the same throughput as a deeply buffered channels. The main advantage is being able to spool up faster and smooth out throughput, but it could be for most workloads that is not valuable enough. Perhaps I placed too much value on that.

Your comment (and others) have convinced me to do some more empirical testing and see how necessary buffered channels are for my goal.