What you described should work.
http://docs.sun.com/app/docs/doc/819-3673/6n5sk1d47?l=en&a=view#beadz
Were the modified jsp files copied to appropriate subdirectories?
Looking at the messages in the server.log, seems the application was actually being reloaded, but the reloading failed for some reason. You can turn the web container logging to a finer level to see if you get more messages.
When you use sun-appserv-deploy to redeploy, the application was able to redeploy successfully? This is a little strange, as the reload is essentially a directory redeployment, and share much of the code path as redeploy on the server side. Maybe you can clean up and give it another try for reload?
BTW: I believe if your changes only involve jsp file changes, a reload or a redeploy is not necessary. You only need to copy the modified jsp files to some location (I am not sure about the details here, someone from web team or netbeans plug in team would know better).
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