Richard King , I've run your test and verified the behavior is as described. I also confirmed an easy workaround is to specify the collection table in the mapping for Payer#eventPayers: <set name="eventPayers" inverse="true" cascade="save-update" table="event_payer">

Heinz Huber I've looked at your pull request and it looks pretty good. I see two problems with it though:
1) The pull request is for 4.2 branch; there have been many changes since 4.2 and pull requests should be created for master branch;
2) In one of your commits, there is an argument added to org.hibernate.persister.entity.Loadable#getTableAliasForColumn. [1]

Steve Ebersole, Can the change be made to Loadable in 5.1, or does it need to wait for 6.0?

[1] https://github.com/racon-am/hibernate-orm/commit/f193128cff2fc8810bcccd6e01117c5e88066f5b