It just dawned on me that I've focused too narrowly on pressing keys for my EMA key binds. This specifically relates to the assist and focus portion of the above. After writing this I recalled recently seeing a mention of slash commands that allow one to trigger the focus/assist/target key binds. I clicked around in the EMA addon and finally found them!

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This very handily obviates the concern regarding whether or not assist or focus are considered actions. Your DPS macro can use /EMAAssistMaster and the healer's heal macro can use /EMAFocusMaster and you can skip including those key presses in a hardware macro.

Yet again I find myself being rather thankful for the work Ebony has done on EMA!