ha okay ! thanks for the info. the only other suggestion i'd have is zulu reader, but i see you've tried that. just so you know, the developpeur of zulu reader is a member of this board, so you might want to get in touch with him and see whether he's open to enhancement requests, and how complicated your feature requests would be. take a look at this thread :
https://www.mobileread.com/forums/showthread.php?t=45859 (that's an old thread so it doesn't mention epub, but the developper's email is in it. for more you can do a search for "zulureader" (no space)).