yeah I too was faced with this, my solution (workaround) is similar to yours, I am writing directly to the .kibana index , essentially, in Ansible I will end up doing something like this in a post deploy task:
curl -XPUT http://<es node>:9200/.kibana/index-pattern/events-* -d '{"title" : "events-*", "timeFieldName": "EventTime"}'
curl -XPUT http://<es node>:9200/.kibana/config/4.1.1 -d '{"defaultIndex" : "events-*"}'
I don't really want to be writing to that index but I also did not want to use the Kibana HTTP flows...So I am interested doing this in a more supported manner.