Reg-Free COM in VSTO Applications

So today I learned from Microsoft Support that Reg-Free COM is not supported in VSTO applications. The reason apparently is that the COM entries need to be linked to the main application manifest. In the case of VSTO applications, these are EXCEL.EXE, WINWORD.EXE, etc. I am asking them if we can work around this by loading the manifest manually via the Activation Context API. I will update when I find out more.