So what I did earlier does not work for Collections. Collections go through a very different code path (even ElementCollection which i found very odd). That code does not use the pieces of PropertyBinder and SimpleValueBinder that got changed. Even more oddly, the only time I see uses of PropertyBinder/SimpleValueBinder from collections are for many-to-many handling: org.hibernate.cfg.annotations.CollectionBinder#bindManyToManySecondPass. Or is this just a badly named method that really handles more that just many-to-many?