Whats the cleanest way to substitute an external dependency with a list of equivalent dependencies - e.g. replacing an uber-jar with it’s constituent pieces. Is it possible without having to create a module that depends on the list?

You can probably use a dependency metadata rule to remove the uber-jar artifact from the dependency and add transitive dependencies to the constituent pieces. https://docs.gradle.org/current/userguide/component_metadata_rules.html

hmm… that would have to be done at the consumer though right?