Indeed it is a kludge. A more ideal solution would allow us us flexibly and dynamically prompt the user for just the necessary info when creating an entity, as here: Ask User Input for Rules
it would be very useful to be able to prompt the user for more info situations like this, to save them from having to explicitly open the new entity and navigate through all its fields to find the ones that should be set. It is much more efficient if the user is simply presented with all the fields that need to be set.