Unity3d – HLSL float4x4 individual floats

You're absolutely right - it would be much clearer and less error prone to dependency mismatch.

But...

What in cases where you don't distribute your web applications within an EAR? Where would you place the libs? How would you go about distributing your webapps throughout different EARs so you would compose enterprise applications based upon a set of webapps?

WEB-INF/lib is also for jars that can contain resources only (with no classes within). Would you then put the web-oriented resources jars in EAR-level lib? I don't think so.

There are perhaps more reasons to use WEB-INF/lib over an EAR's lib, but the above two/three cases should be enough to at least convince you to re-think the strategy to manage libraries.