So I've come up with a solution and that is to not use a colon in the URL.
This required opening up the Tapestry core library and changing the hard-coded colon to a dash (which only works if you don't use dashes in component names!). The Tapestry changes were actually pretty straight-forward and only involved one class (ComponentEventLinkEncoderImpl) Thank god for open source.
I wrote this in here in case someone else has a similar problem.
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