[hibernate-dev] HHH-11147 - bytecode based "proxies"

Over the last 3 weeks or so, we have put a lot of work into HHH-11147 which essentially allows bytecode enhancement to behave like the more traditional proxy feature (create a reference based solely on the entity id). We are wrapping up development of that improvement, enhancement, change, whatever-you-want-to-call-it... One remaining question however is how to make this change available in terms of releases. It seems to big of a deal to simply drop in a new bug-fix release. Should we consider a 5.5 release? Push it to 6? Thoughts?