Here is my confusion. If Google crawls a link, then no matter how it got there it should still be the same regardless of method, right? It would then evaluate if it's time to index it.
You can use a 301 redirect on an unused domain to the tier 1 page to get google to crawl it. I've done this to pages where I have access to the log to view it and google does follow the 301 and requests the page twice(once with reg crawler, once with mobile). This worked great last year and near instant to initiate crawling.
Is the current problem with indexing more than crawling itself? If so, it would stand to reason that using GSC to get google to crawl the 301 to find the new page, and then put it on say twitter and send in another for that page so that there's now some page going to it (i.e. tier 2). This is actually not too far from the blogger/GSC method for indexing.
Perhaps the issue is more fundamental which is around indexing itself. Can a page give you "link juice" even if the page isn't showing in the index itself? Perhaps once you initiate a crawl it's just a waiting game and there is no real effective difference between the free methods and the paid if the initialization of the crawling is all that we have much say over.
I'm actually running 7 tests in parallel right now because I want to know what the deal with indexing is.