I think it makes sense here to test up to the API we're given by the platform, but not necessarily to be testing the entire stack down to a live database. Isolated unit tests help ensure that if the test fails, we know exactly where the problem is. This is looking more like an end-to-end integration test. Thankfully, we now have a set of e2e tests separate from our unit tests. My recommendation would be to hand this feature off to Milan and the QE automation people when you're done so they can do e2e tests on it, and keep our unit tests focused on individual units of code.

Additionally, this is the kind of thing that slows tests down a lot.