Hi, I found myself in a similar position , or just grew tired of all of the fumbling around with the glassfish jars for a stand alone client. So I started using appclient.
(I may have actually had Stand alone clients working a few times..)
What I really liked about GF V2 was that it worked with approximately 4 jars and I think maybe 2-3 with for JMS support. GF v3 seems to need many more jars.
Switching to appclient is alright, if it works for you and you can get your development team to sign off on it, and of course, everyone else that cares 'bout such things.
Personally, I like the dependency injection at that appclient provides at the client level too.
I think that a stand alone JAVA client is actually easier if you are running on a different machine than the server.
In any case, you might check out app client?
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