I have a custom Workflow Action that looks up the Contact's address to get the country. The Action passes back the country in a merge tag. I want to set the Country's value based on the merge tag (or free-form text).

Same with Time Zone. Both of these 2 fields are restricted to only allowing to choose from a pick list.

Of course, do your input sanitization like you should, just allow me to manually type them in or set them according to a merge tag.