I agree the subject here is not very aligned with what actually changed. I will fix that.

Well JPA schema export support is outlined in the JPA spec. It only covers schema creation and dropping however, not any of the other "schema tooling" supported by Hibernate such as update and validation. Yes, as odd as it sounds (very poor names) JPA "schema creation" covers dropping as well.

Hibernate's schema export is the same tool it has always been. Ultimately the plan is to combine these into one set of classes, but for now they are completely separate.

As far as "Spring Framework switches to the standard property for it's EntityManagerFactory setup", that depends on what all you support. If you just support creation and dropping that is fine. If you support update and validate as well, that obviously will not work. One thing you might want to incorporate is a check that the user and Spring are not setting both of these. That is actually the problem you were seeing, coupled with the fact that you were hitting a bug in my schema update code for dealing with quoted identifiers.