Hi! Thanks for the answer. The issue is:

1. HV 4 always checked the "dot" path regardless of presence of @Valid annotation,
2. HV 5 checks the "dot" path only, if the @Valid annotation is present on the parent property,
3. The specification says nothing about the behavior,
4. The HV documentation says that the method implements the behavior from HV 4 (which is not true anymore)

We're building a framework, whose important part is Hibernate Validator. We noticed this issue, when it broke several of our tests during the migration from HV 4 to HV 5 (and I tracked at least one defect reported by our customer related to this issue). For me, the biggest problem is that we don't know which behavior is correct, how to fix the tests, and what to write in OUR documentation for the customers.

Regarding the actual technical solution, removing the support for "dot" syntax now would be a bad idea for us. We can live with the current behavior of HV 5, but we would like to have a proper documentation for it, and maybe some additional unit tests to make sure that it won't change unexpectedly in the future.