Interesting idea. I'm not sure just providing a bypass path for the hydrualic oil would be good enough. Since it's an open-center system, the only resistance it's seeing now is pushing the oil through the hoses and valves, right? And in theory, the hydrostatic drive pump doesn't even do that...if the treadle is centered the oil is never forced out of the pump. For the gear pump, the oil is forced through the hoses and valves then back to the reservoir without doing any work. I suppose pushing it through a much shorter set of hoses would lead to much less resistance. I gathered from an earlier post that the majority of the resistance seems to come from the hydro-static drive pump...I guess just spinning the fixture that holds the pistons in the cold thick oil is high resistance.
In the other thread I started before I saw this one, I was thinking of possibly replacing the couplings to both pumps with some sort of centrifugal clutches. That way you could crank the engine with no resistance from the pumps, then when you increase the throttle, the pumps would engage. The only problem with this idea is that the clutch connecting the hydrostatic drive pump would need a way to "lock it"...otherwise you wouldn't be able to bleed the HS pump by unplugging the spark plugs and cranking the engine to slowly turn the pump.
Dave