Proposed solution worked fine for page commenting which handles all its needs in one action/model, but it is not enough for general forums where thread viewing in handled by action and message creation is handled solely by ForumController and first message needs to be created together with the forum because of the "firstMessage" reference property. Either we make this property non mandatory so thread can be created without it or we need to rework the flow so the "auto create" threads can be recognized and handled by actions appropriately (i.e. return empty list of messages for the thread that is to be auto-created and doesn't exist yet).
Got a local p.o.c working. Need to see how it behaves with regards to permissions and on a public instance (typically for a page commenting scenario)