We're not wholescale rejecting everything related to the Criteria API, only new features/improvements that wouldn't fit in with the longer-term goal: focusing on the JPA Criteria API and, where necessary, extending it with Hibernate-specific features.

So, considering that it's realistically deprecated, do you really want to implement equals and hashCode on all Criterion impls (not just Restrictions)? If the improvement is complete and well unit-tested, I'm up for merging it. What do you think?