Correct - this change wasn't followed through to a useable state for anyone wanting to work with an existing 4.x database. The problem is that the original classes are still in Hibernate, but not functional and to write my own strategy, I would have to understand the internals of how Hibernate used to do name mapping for tables, columns, foreign keys... Maybe not rocket science, but it entails a long code review/develop/test/debug process that is painful because I will have no idea if my mapping scheme EXACTLY matches the old one or if it will miss some special case that only show up a remote customer site

For someone like a Spring core developer that must support potentially millions of existing databases, I can see them having resources to deal with this. However, the rest of us are almost guaranteed to create an 80% correct solution that "works" most of the time until it we get a support call showing it doesn't