Not sure if you've solved this already by updating your jars but here go some answers:
Upon digging deeper I find that the JsonPropertyDescription class that is in the github for jackson, is not packaged with the annotations 2.2.3 jar.
It's a new feature in 2.3.
Is there some new way I haven't seen to take an object and print it to json?
I don't think so: writeValueAsString() 2.3.3 (it's not deprecated).
It looks like someone had a similar problem and the solution they suggested is basically "update your jars". The asker didn't reply so we don't know whether that worked or not.