I may be missing something obvious, but I guess I'm confused why the start levels would help. Since a feature's bundles are order-specific, there wouldn't actually be a difference, right?

But, am I correct that you're not directly using the feature we generate? I would definitely expect issues if you're trying to start the hibernate-envers bundle before hibernate-core (unless Steve's latest work in ORM 5 contradicts that). I'm more curious about what you mean here:

(this only happens during application deployment (about 100 bundles and 50 entities), not when deploying the plain hibernate-envers feature with nothing else)

Any more details available about the bundles you're using and the order in which you're starting them? If you're not using our features, I'd argue that ordering/start-levels would be the application's responsibility...