Looking more at the information sent, I believe --libraries is equivalent to the Libraries option in the JMX and admin consoles. I tried setting that to my docroot -- both as a relative and absolute path. This didn't seem to add docroot to the classloader anywhere, much less prior to WEB-INF/classes.
Specifying an "extra-class-path" of "." in sun-web.xml adds the docroot to the classloader -- but after WEB-INF/lib/*.jar rather than before WEB-INF/classes.
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