Apparently, you are right. Unpack seems to only work in post-package phases, I guess due to the way that m2e assembles its build priorities.
So, I'm back to the starting point. The problem with the shade plugin is that I am trying to avoid refactoring classes into different packages, mostly because the code base is so fragmented that I'm entirely sure what gets broken when things get moved. Right now, Ant selectively picks and chooses which files to compile/package from the module for each artifact.
If I keep all the files in the same module, and then only extract the required files that I want, I can then repackage them using the jar plugin or the ejb-plugin and generate client ejbs based on the selected files (easy to accomplish via the unpack goal).
However, like you just pointed out, unpack doesn't work well in Eclipse, so I'm a little back up the proverbial creek. I don't see how the shade plugin will necessarily help out, unless I start refactoring files into separate packages, in which case I can imagine that I might want to augment a jar with files from a previously compiled jar.
Unless I'm still looking at this upside down?
Thanks,
Eric