Your workaround will work.
Since you have two drives, you should install Natty's boot loader to sdb, and have Maverick's boot loader in sda. Then you could boot either via BIOS and each will discover and let you boot the other.
Unless you have an old system with the 137GB BIOS boot limit or a server (or sever like desktop) with RAID or LVM, I would not have a separate /boot partition.
Herman on advantages/disadvantages of separate system partitions post#3
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1410392
Installing Ubuntu in Hard Disk Two (or more) internal or external
http://members.iinet.net.au/~herman546/p24.html
You can share swap if you do not hibernate, but should only share /home if upgrading and not really going back as newer setting in /home may conflict with older versions of software. Software is usually designed to allow upgrades but not necessarily down grades. If you want to share files, you can create additional data partition(s).
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