During our team meeting today we decided that it would be best if we added a new property e.g. hibernate.mergegraph which accepts a EntityGraph that can be used to specify what parts of an entity to load when the merge operation is invoked. Additionally, there should be some way to create a special default graph or a special configuration value for the previously mentioned property to load only the parts which are marked as EAGER in the model.

Would that be enough for you?