I ended up making all properties I needed to only add attributes to virtual, and overriding them alone in another class, with the relevant newtonsoft attributes.
This allows me to have different serialisation behavior when de-serialising from CouchDB and serialising for a GET, without too much dupe. It is fine, and a bonus, that the two are coupled; any changes in the base i would want anyway.
It would still be nice to know if my original question is possible?
