That is a very interesting twist to what I was thinking about. Might be fun to try it out. You could grow them up, cut the branches for clones and see what happens. It would be a fair amount of stress to the plant so you might want to make sure you aren't risking hermies.This is so weird, I was just thinking about a similar design the other day, using 4" PVC cut into 18" long pieces. My idea was to veg to about 1 foot high, then remove all the lower leaves from the plant, add rooting hormone to the cuts that are made, and bury the roots and the bottom 8 or so inches of the plant into the pipe, give it 5 days to start developing roots, and then go into flowering with these super short plants that have massive root systems. I dunno how well it will work, I was just considering it as a concept.
I like the idea. I was just thinking of doing 6-8" pipe though. Bigger size but similar idea. I would love to hear how it works.