Thanks for the feedback, I appreciate it. PKS013 was in response to troubleshooting a few issues that took weeks to resolve and required us to peak inside multiple jar files to figure out why we were running into class loading problems.

When the same set of problems appeared in other projects and took longer for less experienced engineers to resolve we thought we had to take steps to mitigate the real cost of using the MANIFEST.MF to declare class paths and hence we thought PKS013 was the best approach.