The as supports "unmanaged" deployment content via the <fs-archive> and <fs-exploded> child elements of the deployment element. The CLI should make it possible to take advantage of this without requiring a low level command. I haven't looked into it carefully, but I think it could be a simple boolean param to the deploy command. If "true", check whether the file specified by file_path is a directory; if yes, use fs-exploded, else use fs-archive.