Activating Eclipse WTP Dynamic Web Project creates extraneous EAR projects

[lmsurpre]

We have a multi-module Maven project that builds a mix of jar and war projects and we notice that, when we import these projects into eclipse as Existing Maven Projects (with Liberty Tools installed), it generates a corresponding EAR project for every dependency of the war project.

We've done some research on this and found others with similar issues like https://stackoverflow.com/questions/50613029/eclipse-import-existing-maven-projects-create-ear-project-automatically

The accepted answer claims this is an artifact of an older version of the WebSphere tools, but I'm seeing this behavior even with the latest WebSphere Liberty Tools (2019-09).

Unfortunately, we can't seem to find a way to disable/workaround this annoying behavior. We can either:

1. disable wtp activation as described in that stack overflow post, then document how to enable project facets for the 2 web projects in our list; or
2. instruct users to manually delete all the generated EAR projects

And in the case of number 1, I found that even if i just manually enable the Dynamic Web Module facet, clicking "Apply and Close" will generate a corresponding EAR project (but at least it doesn't generate an EAR project for all of its dependencies as well).

When I perform the same action using Eclipse 2019-09 WITHOUT the Liberty Tools, there are no extraneous EAR projects created.

[prb112]

I was able to replicate the behavior as well with a fresh workspace and git. If you want to clone https://github.com/ibm/fhir (it'll show the problem with fhir-parent and importing that project and submodules)