Considering that hot deployment did not even work in beta1, beta2 is an improvement. The deployers have been moved form JMX-based to microcontainer-based, hence some of the growing pains. Therefore your choices are:

1) wait for beta3 and hope is works better (should be out end of this month, beginning of next moth)
2) put up with restarting the server to redeploy apps in beta2
3) go back to a production release such as 4.2.1