OMG... the 1.0.6 merge to qa worked without jumping through jboss-as-binaries hoops... that's a good sign:
[dsicore@labs01 forge]$ svn ci -m "MERGED: -r 1496:1615 https://svn.labs.jboss.com/trunk/forge into qa. Testing for the 1.0.6 release of Labs begins." Committed revision 1616.