konrad,
Our AS 7 adapter is still evolving so your input is appreciated.
To explain why AS7 adapter works like it does right now then 99% of the logic is based of how the previous jboss adapters worked and here we did explicitly decided not to trigger redeploys of applications on class changes because of two things:
1) restart the app could be a rather heavy operation in previous AS versions
2) if you are editing/saving multiple class files you would trigger multiple restarts for no real good reason.
3) when you restart you loose the session context thus making live debugging almost impossible.
#1 is not relevant anymore, but 2 & 3 still is but im open for suggestions ;)
...so back to your questions:
Concern 1:
We deploy archives content exploded by default and then its up to the runtime frameworks to pick up changes (thats what you see happen when (x)html resources are picked up - thats us just copying over incrementally and then its jboss web and jsf fwk that picks up the changes).
You can (since JBoss Tools M2 I believe) right click on a module to trigger a restart.
That gives a pretty nice balance IMO, but i'm sure you are about to give me examples of where its not - let me know :)
Concern 2:
If I understand you correctly here then you want all deployments that have a transitive dependency to a project to repackage.
I can see the usecase for that but haven't seen other adapters do this. Are you saying Tomcat 7 adapter does that ?
p.s. Rob that works on the incremental deployment aspect adapter is on PTO at the moment - but i'll answer/find what I can ;)