In order to reduce publishes, i've been looking at using the plugin
jRebel to do the hot deployments and it seems to be working. This is especially useful since RAD doesn't support hot deployments. JRebel supports most of the changes that I do on a daily basis, but there are still some changes that require publish such as Hibernate Config or J2EE bean changes, but most other code changes seem to work. The only negative is that the plugin is a bit expensive.
I'm looking into other things to reduce publish times, but I don't have anything definitive answers at this time.