I have a multi-module maven project with ear, war, ejb ...
The excludejars-web/pom.xml defines <packagingExcludes>WEB-INF/lib/*</packagingExcludes>

When deploying excludejars-ear to WF, the excludejars-ear/excludejars-web-0.0.1-SNAPSHOT.war/WEB-INF/lib directory is empty, as expected.

Now if you remove <packagingExcludes>WEB-INF/lib/*</packagingExcludes> from the excludejars-web/pom.xml , Update the Maven project configuration (Alt-F5) on the excludejars-web project, org.eclipse.wst.common.component is updated to contain <property name="component.exclusion.patterns"/>

When you do a full publish on the ear project, excludejars-ear/excludejars-web-0.0.1-SNAPSHOT.war/WEB-INF/lib is still empty. Same thing if you invoke "clean" on the WF server adapter.

The only way to get the jars deployed is to remove the ear from WF, clean, then add the ear back.