Yes, it is probably possible to solve this just by re-thinking the order of events and what actually depends on what. You can usually come up with some workable chain of events using lazy loading. I would also not be too fuzzed about the time of creation of the attribute - if you use lazy the attribute is guaranteed to be populated before you use it the first time, which should be all that matters. In some cases, setting a trigger for an attribute might also help to resolve some more complicated dependencies.