Hi Ian,
I can't speak to the issue you've encountered in ESB 4.8, but I can speak to the tooling around it. A decision was made to support ESB 4.7 in JBoss Tools 3.1 and then we make a jump to ESB 4.9 in JBoss Tools 3.2, which should be out in the next few months. So we definitely don't have any explicit support for ESB 4.8 for Galileo or Helios.
That's probably not the answer you were looking for.
--Fitz