A few years ago I added support to the Sakai Maven Plugin to deploy everything that normally goes into /shared/lib and common/lib into just /lib, as per the standard Tomcat classloader layout.
To use, add -Dsakai.app.server=tomcat7 to the build command. Everything gets deployed to /lib and Sakai starts up without any modifications (except the standard connector modification in server.xml and the optional performance improvements in catalina.properties).
Enjoy the future!
