Steve, sorry if i hit any sensible spot, no need to be sarcastic. Please let me know if i wrote something to upset you.

Fine, you're quoting the JDBC spec. Since when is Hibernate or any JPA implementation a JDBC implementation as well? I haven't said a word about JDBC driver (in my case MySQL) doing anything wrong, plain opposite is true.

Let me repeat it for you: The MySQL driver takes the date column and converts it to a calendar. It does this right be obeying my wish to use UTC. The result is a calendar with hours, minutes, seconds and milliseconds set to zero (right according to the JDBC spec).
In the next step this instance is converted to the JVM timezone. I guess it's hibernate. So far everything is correct.
Then you strip everything time to zero. But this is wrong. The resulting calendar cannot be transformed to something valid without resorting to single fields or string formats.

What kind of argument are you referring to? Apparently the Oracle driver changed his behavior, for better or worse, i don't know. But this is a driver, not a Hibernate, problem.
My argument was that Hibernate should not try to fix a driver problem or if it does so, do it right.