Following the lead of this question, I tried (naievely) to do this:
protractor test/features/protractor-conf.js --params.test_set=dev_test
and
protractor-conf.js:
exports.config = {
// ...
specs: [browser.params.test_set+'/*.feature'],
... but of course it doesn't work because browser is not defined at the time that the conf file is parse.
So how could I achieve this effect: passing a parameter to protractor that determines the specs?