catalina.properties and catalina.policy are ignored

Any configuration that is done in catalina.properties or catalina.policy is not considered when Tomcat is started via the tomcat-maven-plugin. I have tried to pass the system property -Dcatalina.config=/path/to/catalina.properties, but it is actually never read in the plugin code.

The reason seems to be that in AbstractRunMojo.java the Tomcat container is created using

...
container = new Catalina();
...

When starting Tomcat manually using catalina.bat/sh, the container is started via Bootstrap.java which – in addition to creating a new Catalina instance – reads and processes the two above mentioned files. In our special case we are relying on the shared.loader=/path/to/shared/libs/*.jar configuration in catalina.properties.

Is this a known/intended issue? Is this something that we can hope for a fix in a future version?

Cheers and kind regards,
Torben