Real players elevate their belts so they can run their pipelines directly on the ground because, and I can't express this strong enough, fuck headlift with a rusty spork.
Kinda but not quite. The fluid buffer isn't necessary and it's just one pipe going up and down. The idea of a water tower is to pressurize all your pipes with just one headlift pipe. Let's say you need 1800 cubic meters of water to go up 40m. How many mk 2 pumps do you need? Three? Actually you need just one. You take one pipe, add the pump to it and bring it up to 40m, then bring it back down. That pipe is your "water tower". You then connect it to the three pipes you want going up to your factory and all those pipes will move water up to the water tower height. The best part is that you can connect however many additional pipes to that water tower and they all will flow up to the same height without any additional pumps.
That's the first problem I address, but by the end I'm driving trucks full speed through the middle of my ultra dense mega factory production floor under a spaghetti canopy. It's a thing of beauty.