Thanks!
I'd planned to verify the suggested workaround and post the bug this weekend but you seem to have beat me to it!
I did get a chance to verify the workaround and it seems good. I've built my own eclipselink jar and got it up and running in my development environment and it seems to be working as I had hoped. I now have an eclipselink-orm.xml in my entities project and was able to successfully define and use some converters.
Thanks very much to all that replied and helped me out with this - I really appreciate it!
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