> Is it worth making it the default scanner in our next release?
I'd say let's experiment a bit first.
Just for aesthetics, I think the informative markers should be called: deploying, deployed/failed, undeploying, undeployed.
Then, the removal of the packed archive makes for a more symmetrical trigger, too. Do you know if that causes any resource/class-loading issues in the unpacked case? If this is so, maybe removing the .deployed descriptor is a preferred trigger, but that should delete the deployment, too.
I'm not set about the redeploy trigger. Maybe touching the .deployed descriptor is a good option, after all.