De Gaia, in general, start levels should not be needed. The few lines in the quickstarts that have "30" start levels are copy/pasted from Karaf's built-in features. The quickstart feature.xml files should certainly be considered as rough examples.

Hibernate ORM 4 in OSGi should still be considered rudimentary. You're correct that there are several best practices that aren't solidified, but it's mainly due to ORM still being fairly static and not entirely ready for everything I'd like to considered. A lot of this is covered in our devguide and HHH-8501.

However, to be honest, Karaf and Felix were the main targets of integration testing. I still need to try it on Equinox and a few others. If something is hanging, my guess is that there's a platform difference that I haven't come across yet.