I'm telling you, taking the whole thing out is far easier than trying to remove connector shards while on the car and not having them end up in your heater core.

 

SUCCESS!

While you are technically correct about taking out the whole hose, I spent a very frustrating amount of time trying to get the clamp on the engine side off. The cable type hose clamp puller would not fit in a way that I could move the clamp up the hose and the 90* pliers were just unworkable.

So I took a large set of vice grips and pinched off the hose just upstream of the remainder of the connector. Just doing this cracked the piece and I removed the pieces. Luckily, it seemed to crack lengthwise into longer shards that were much easier to extract. The hose was wide enough that I could check with my pinky finger that I got all of the pieces. As someone else suggested in one of these threads, I pieced it all back together to make sure I wasn't missing much, if any.

The Z1 connector/bleeder is a nice piece. I'm glad I got this done. Peace of mind can be hard to come by these days!

Thanks again to all who contributed to this thread and good luck to all who attempt it!