If we add this compliance setting, I actually feel even more strongly that this logging should be DEBUG.

+1

No strong opinion, but personally I'd rather keep this "as is" than introducing various need-to-know and flags. Best thing we can do to help the occasional user like Valerie Griffin is to document a safe alternative to bootstrap Hibernate ORM, in the future we might be able to champion better approches for the JPA specification.

+1