Although the Swarm team have a strict policy of using the library versions that are bundled with Wildfly, nothing prevents a contributor from creating a custom fraction that bundles a newer version of a library. However, for that to happen, it's necessary to have a feature pack ZIP, as the wildfly-swarm-plugin requires it. The feature pack behaves exactly as your ZIP right now, however in a different structure (as the PR illustrates) .

Would it make sense to keep building the ZIP file as you do now AND the feature pack ZIP for Swarm?

I am also looking forward to hearing from the Wildfly team if the feature pack can be used to update the core libraries.