Working around remainder links

[Creeperman]

I have a situation in which a unit comes by default with a melee weapon, to which I am assigning a wpn.melee tag via Evaluate script so I can correctly process the unit's attack stats. It is also possible for the unit to select additional weapons to replace the default melee weapon, which may or may not be of the same type. I cannot use a remainder link since remainders do not support Evaluate statements, and I can't assign the default weapon tags to the unit directly since the user might replace the melee weapon with a ranged one. So far, I'm stuck between reporting inaccurate unit stats or else creating the unit in an invalid state (without weapons) and trusting the user to fix it.

Is there any way to get remainder link type behavior (ie, default selection) without actually using a remainder link, so I can assign tags to the default weapons' Evaluate script?