Hi John,
Support for a formKey on a start event is added in the March 1st release.
When you add the formKey in the XML, the Activiti Designer tries to merge it into the diagram, but because the formKey was not supported it's removed again.
You are right that there's no deployment view. In the coming days I will give the userguide the necessary update.
When you right-click on an Activiti project you see an create deployment artifacts option at the bottom of the popup menu.
This creates a BAR file containing the BPMN 2.0 XML and the task forms and optionally a JAR file containing the Java classes.
Best regards,