While that would indeed work, I'm sure there must be a better way. One that always works is to put all the grub stuff into its own primary partition and make t

While that would indeed work, I'm sure there must be a better way. One that always works is to put all the grub stuff into its own primary partition and make that one bootable. Of course that would greatly complicate the installation process, but maybe grub can reuse some of the work that was done for parted. If grub was in its own partition, the likelihood of it being broken by third party software is much lower. What could happen is that some software resets the boot partition flag, but that's easily restored. In case of EFI, if I understand correctly, you can even mark any file on any partition bootable (blessing the file is the term, I think), which makes it even easier.