distcp behaves differently through code compared to toolrunner invocation from command-line

In Hadoop 2.5 the behavior of distcp changed when called through code iff the target directory did not exist and update wasn't used and atomic wasn't used.
HADOOP-10459 introduced a change to preserve the root directory attributes. It introduced a derivative property in the options as well as in the configuration whether the target path exists. See https://github.com/apache/hadoop/commit/c5b59477775c797944db4992e8a70289ba2895ed
However, this property is set only when distcp is used through the command line as a ToolRunner in Distcp.run(String[] argv).
The result is that when the target directory doesn't exist (and neither -update nor -atomic options are used) SimplyCopyListing incorrectly assumes that the target directory does exist because the attribute defaults to true. Copying directory a/b/c to xyz results in the creation of a xyx/c directory with the content of c in it, rather than the content of c getting copied into directory xyz directly.