Is it possible to get Entity Connect and Entity Reference View Widget to work together and if so how? It seems to me this should be a fairly common problem, but I can't seem to find and answer despite looking!

Here is my use case: I have two types of content: Activity and Participants. When I create a new Activity I want to be able to add multiple Participants to the Activity, and allow the user either to pick the Participants from a list of those already in the system, or to create new ones "on the fly".

I'm using an "Entity Reference" field in the Activity content type, to reference one or more Participants

So far, I have managed to do one part of my use case, or the other, but not both at once. Entity Connect works fine and creates a modal window in which I can create a new Participant or modify an existing one. Entity Reference View Widget also works fine, and allows me to create a view which I can then use to multi-select existing Participants. But I can't get both to play together (although the Entity Connect project page suggests it should work). Entity Connect only seems to work with the autocomplete widget, whereas Entity Reference View Widget only works with its own widget (logically!).

Has anyone been able to get these two modules to work nicely together and if so how, or should I be using another combination (References Dialog and something else for example)?
This week a patch for both modules was released that may fix the issue (see Can't get Entity Connect to work with Entity Reference View Widget, which also links to the second patch). As of today (23 Mar 14), the patches still need review.