Maven is intended to construct deployable objects. A loose directory isn't really a "deployable object" since it's a collection of objects. Besides, most platforms are expecting a unitary deployment, not a flood of objects, anyway, although some (such as the
tomcat webapp server) can work with the exploded version of a jar (WAR).
In most jar projects, there would actually be a residual copy of the exploded files in the target directory along with the product jar itself. I'm not 100% sure in the case of executable jars, however, if there would be one with the dependencies in it or not. Note, however, that jars inside a classpath directory are not themselves made part of the classpath.
What I was recommending was more like this:
Note that the colon (":") is a semi-colon (";") when running in Windows.
Whether or not this will actually work depends on whether the custom classloader needed to access any sub-jars inside the executable jar is activated. It should be, but you'll have to
test it.