haha, yes, you did think about this a lot. In my opinion you should just add the . option in this workflow. It's a nice addition and at that point you would have all the features that the pinboard bookmarklet has, which would be neat. (well, except autocompletion, but I'm not sure if that is possible or even a good idea)
I personally am not really into the idea of a reading list workflow because I use dedicated apps for that purpose. Pocket for Mac is just wonderful.
(at this point you are probably wondering why I even tag bookmarks as unread in Pinboard. Well, for articles/pages I may want to come back and check out later. For Instance when somebody makes a prediction about something, I save the page as unread in Pinboard so that I can come back and see if the prediction was right.)