I'm glad we managed to get to the bottom of this. The suggestion to use the copy approach to the hotdeploy directory was more of a workaround than a long term solution.
It seems that the port for the project deploy mojo defaults to 1099. This is documented here. You should be able to configure this to your port 2099
mvn jbi:projectDeploy -Dport=2099
I've just noticed Ulhas has responded with the same thing!
All right, I think we can leave with that until modifying the servicemix.properties file will work. Many thanks.
Nicolas