HHH-10913 Closed , while a duplicate, does verify that this issue still affects 5.2.

The "analysis" here misses the underlying problem. Multiple problems actually. The first is the use of String comparisons; this really ought to leverage org.hibernate.boot.model.naming.Identifier. The second is that, yes, naming strategies are applied inconsistently as part of table-name matching - in my opinion though naming strategies ought to play no part in name matching. We will discuss this on the dev mailing list.

On a related note... Another thing we should support is for @org.hibernate.annotations.Table#appliesTo to be empty as means to referring to the root table, similar to JPA (javax.persistence.Column#table e.g.).