Spring Framework improved its support so that Hibernate 5.2 works as well so the natural step is to support that release in Spring Boot as well.

A typical hibernate application based on JPA requires hibernate-entitymanager. One major problem we are facing is that hibernate-entitymanager is no longer required in 5.2 but no longer exists either. I don't see how we could ever support any generation before 5.2 if we bump our build to 5.2.

Our users are relying on "starters" to get the dependencies they need. We have "data-jpa" starter that brings hibernate and has an explicit reference to that artifact. We can change it but then the starter won't work < 5.2

FYI, Spring Boot has support for both 4.x and 5.x generation up to 5.1. Could you please consider adding hibernate-entitymanager again? This could be an empty artifact that depends on hibernate-core.