"Also the behaviors cannot be aligned because as-legacy uses jmx for deployment scanner management, while as >=7 uses management ports. " ....that sounds to like why you would like it to be aligned...

Maybe we mixing up wordings here - what I would expect is that majority of the flow could be defined in one place, something like:

server.start()
server.preHotDeploy()
server.publish(files, true)
server.postHotDeploy()
server.stop()

and then up to the server implementation what happens in here - as7 would add/remove and as6's would not do it.

Hope that makes more sense.