This doesn't sound so bad. After reading the paragraph that ended with "Confused? Yeah I was too..." I wasn't confused at all, actually your explanation was good and basically makes sense to me. Maybe not ideal, but that being said, the fact that you were able to come up with what looks like a pretty decent work around is really a credit to the process. The command line Ant tools enable all kinds of customized stuff as well as supporting using tools other than Eclipse. (at my last job we heavily customized it to support building "branded" apps that were released to the market with different package names and images) I'm pretty glad that they based the build system on it, even though Ant itself is terrifying.

I guess after working on BlackBerry apps, I'm spoiled by Android's tools. (to build a BB app of even moderate complexity and deploy it to a device, you have to contact a RIM server. Every. single. time. That and the Eclipse plugin was straight up broken for a long time)