Actually, I don't mind your rant at all. I am looking for exactly the kind of logging you describe as being the right way to do logging: messages written for operators/administrators to aid them in error recovery. Someone told me that JBoss did its logging that way but it seems I was sent to the wrong place. Given that you've posted over 8,000 times ince 2005, I'm assuming you're very familiar with JBoss and speak with some authority on this subject ;-)
Given the large number of projects - and presumably developers - working on JBoss, it seems likely that some projects are better written than others. Perhaps my colleague saw one of those and assumed all the logging was of the same high quality throughout JBoss. But rather than trying to track down what project he saw, I think I'm going to take your hint and look at Ant or Maven. I actually use Ant so that would be interesting to see. I've never actually used JBoss yet.
Thanks very much for your help, Peter!