This page https://community.jboss.org/wiki/HowToPutAnExternalFileInTheClasspath details how to put a directory on the AS7 classpath which is inconvenient and could easily be done by default.

If AS7 out of the box came with /standalone/classes or /standalone/conf (conf would introduce a bit of backwards compatability) and perhaps /standalone/lib/*.jar added to the classpath it would be as good as previous JBoss versions.

This could be implemented as a module as in the above documents and automatically added to classpaths if the dirs exists in the same way other modules are automatically added to the CP if certain criteria are met.

Ideally is should be possible to make these symlinks on win7 and nix. Since it is natural to put config in /etc per Linux file system standards.