What you're saying doesn't even sound like you need a normal MVC application, thus my first thought is that Laravel seems like an overcomplication.

I guess it's hard to give you advice without seeing the greater context, but it sounds to me like you just need to maybe use just Eloquent as a stand alone package (or hell, just use Docrine's DBAL to go really low-level), and then write some clean object-oriented code to accomplish the steps in the process that need to be done.

But my gut tells me that you're trying to use Laravel to accomplish a task isn't well suited for.

Yeah, I suppose I gave a bit too narrow of a picture. The full application does enough that I think it's worthwhile to use a framework: user accounts, subscription payments, a web-based front end for users, an administrative backend, etc. It's a lot more straightforward to conceive how those parts will be coded up though. The part of the application I explained in the post above is just the part where I'm drawing a mental block.

I'm struggling to get myself out of a coding mindset where everything is tightly coupled, but I may just be getting stuck on the fear that the way I do it isn't going to be perfect.

You could probably use observers, event handlers or a push queue similar to ironmq