I believe something like the work I had in mind for
https://github.com/hibernate/hibernate-orm/wiki/Proposal---Loader-redesign
is the best option for implementing JPA 2.1 "entity graph" support into
Hibernate. To that end I have been working on that proposal to see how
quickly that could come about.
Essentially the phase we need to tie in "entity graph" support is a
redefinition of the current JoinWalkers. The approach I took, at a high
level, is that of the visitor pattern.
The work currently lives at
https://github.com/sebersole/hibernate-loader-redesign I'd appreciate
any extras eyes.
Longer term I'd like the stuff that lives in the
org.hibernate.loader.walking package to be part of the run time
(persister) metadata, but for the moment I just use wrapping and
delegation.