UPDATE

My case was solved with hand editing WSDL from encoded to literal (basically under operations input and output use="literal" was the only replacement) and then I could generate stubs with Apache CXF. It could be done, because endpoint wasn’t parsing RPC/encoded exactly and RPC/encoded spec XML couldn’t be validated against WSDL).

Although Axis 1.4 may work for you, using Apache CXF with that little WSDL hack, may be a better way.

[Old answer]

For reference — I opted for using JAX-RPC and Axis 1.4 this time. I generated client code and hopefully can replace it with JAX-WS implementation when service gets upgraded.