I think I've finally got it. If I ignore the warnings, then tried to manually deploy the human-task war it deploys, finds the in-memory database, and starts doing its thing. The rest of the apps fail to deploy, though, but the reason is their deployments are hitting the default timeout limit of 300s and rolling back. That seems like an awfully short default timeout for such large deployment archives and complex initialization they all go through. Probably because I'm doing this on a network drive with lots of latency. Increasing the deployment timeout of the scanner in the standalone.xml to 1800, rebooting the jboss server, seems to have done the trick. All have deployed now.
One note though, the server logs contain dozens of warnings on deployments about class path entries not pointing to valid jars and invalid jar files, and so on, but deployment seems successful anyway. All these inconsequential errors and warning are disconcerting, especially when one works in an enterprise environment that does not tolerate a single log entry in any production app or container runtime with a log entry severity level over INFO.....
Anyway, thanks for the help, will move forward with my POC. Hoping to replace Oracle SOA Suite, is the main point of my exercise....