I'm glad you posted this; it AMAZES me that not only has this simple idea -- managing dependencies at the application level -- not been more widely adopted, but that there has been a massive investment in complex "chroot" jails like Docker to hack around it.

It's just insane.

As an alternative suggestion to launch4j -- on end-user desktop installations where one wants native packages -- I think AOT-compilation with tools like RoboVM are ultimately the future:

http://www.robovm.org/