Cannot install windows 8.1 on imac 5k - apple support says "Correct, that machine can't install windows" Boot camp fail

I have a brand new imac 5k, with 4ghz i7, 295x GPU, 3.1TB fusion drive.  Bought the machine so I could dual boot - I need windows for VR Dev work.
I've spent the last week and a half on tech support calls with Apple Senior Tech agents, and Microsoft agents as well, and today have been told that indeed this machine cannot run windows 8.1.  Apparently Apple engineering knows about the issue, but says the problem is microsoft's.  Ugh.
The latest iteration of the issue comes when installing 8.1 onto an external thunderbolt SSD (without even using boot camp) - I go through the EFI installer, convert the drive to GPT, format it as ntfs, but when I select the partition to install onto, the installer says it can't find the partition it just created.  Smuh? 
I've also tried the install through boot camp.  This installation actually worked twice, but the install was unstable.  After booting back into osX, then returning to Windows, the windows install went corrupt and couldn't be repaired.  Subsequent attempts to install windows yielded a flurry of different errors, including "windows doesn't support GPT in this mode" or "the disk is locked, please unlock the disk" or "MBR must be converted to GPT" (where once I converted to GPT, the drive could no longer be found, despite the operation completing successfully.)
At any rate, it's a huge mess.  I'd happily return the machine for a different config, but the company I bought it from will only swap it for a similar model -- so I've spent a pile on a machine that does not function as advertised; apple says "too bad, talk to Microsoft." Microsoft says "too bad, we've never seen this, this is an apple issue."
Has anyone out there gotten windows up and running on an iMac5k with fusion drive?  If so, did you have to go through a crazy maze to make it work?
Any help is appreciated.
Thanks,
MC

Michael Conelly wrote:
After much gnashing of teeth, and a half dozen support calls, I'd all but given up.  I finally seem to have solved this though - sort of - by installing windows 8.1 on boot camp on an older iMac, then cloning the bootcamp disk to an external thunderbolt drive via Winclone.  That worked seamlessly, sticking to winclone's instructions, and I can boot via EFI to Windows 8.1 on the new iMac.  So far so good.
I usually install W8.1 via EFI by using DU and a Free Space partition. The 3TB Fusion is first split into the underlying SSD/HDD physicals. OSX and Windows OSes are installed on SSD via EFI (no BCA). The OSX part and half the HDD are then used to create a new CS volume. The other HDD half becomes NTFS for non-Windows OS files. The Hybrid MBR method is completely unsatisfactory with the 3TB Fusion drive.
How is the TB/Winclone image for performance of the OS (since pagefile.sys is also on the TB)?

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