Hey guys,
Robolectric admin here :-)
Just to bring you up to date with what is happening in Robolectric land in case it influences any design decisions in your fix. We've moved configuration of manifest, resources and assets location to a build system API, see here for details:-
http://robolectric.org/build-system-integration/
This is currently supported in Android Studio / Gradle 3.0 and we have Bazel supporting soon too.
Right now we still deal with raw resources (which should be merged by the build system ideally) but later this year we plan on supporting binary resources and deprecating support for raw resources. This is going to give a more actuate simulation of Android since we're no longer concerned with emulating resource merging or aapt behavior. Robolectric itself will actually be faster although that work is pushed into the build system.
Do you have any idea what the user base is of folks still running Eclipse + Maven for Android Dev? We'd ideally not like to break people with our changes.
Let me know if this is something you are interested in supporting and I'll be happy to help.
Jonathan