This is the type of programming issue that could drive one insane.
For some reason, suddenly getting 503 error in Jetty running Jetty Maven Plugin in Eclipse. That's it. No other explanation. Servlet could not be initialized. No additional clues to be had. Logging is printing to screen. Nada of use.
Finally just recomplied the whole multi-node project. Got errors that certain directories could not be deleted. Could not delete the directories manually until I closed Eclipse and everything related to this thing.
Once I deleted the directories and re-installed all the nodes, it worked again.