I agree with you that calling the Jig to propagate the call is the right thing. The problem is that at this point the chef jig is mostly not functional, and will be a bit till it is.
I think the proposal application path will help shake out more requirements out of the Chef jig that just this narrower case of node creation.
The production only wrapper is so that we don't get errors on travis or unit/bdd testing from chef, since it doesn't exist in those environments.