Hi,
Mikael's documentation is right.
This is actually a consequence of
https://bugs.eclipse.org/bugs/show_bug.cgi?id=353889 . This is a very hard bug to fix and since there are decent workarounds for every flavor of it, it's not one that receive much actual contributions.
For your use-case, there is currently nothing better than what Mikael's suggests in TPD documentation. Note that it's actually not that bad as it allows the generated .target file to be published on Nexus, which usually turns into a good practices when project scales up in number of modules and developers. So in the end, you're already starting to adopt a best practice, isn't it cool? ;)
If you'd like to improve this story and contribute code, I suggest you first audit what makes you use the .tpd files instead of the .target directly; and instead of tweaking Tycho you may be able to contribute the support for what you need in .target directly in PDE and Tycho to get rid of the .tpd and all the complexity brought by the layer of generation.
