Thanks for the reply, Steve. Is there already an issue open that you're aware of for the fact that we're initializing an entity when attempting to access transient state?

My situation is that I have entity inheritance with Discriminators. If a field's declared type is one of the subtypes (not the abstract supertype), then I should be able to determine what it's discriminator is by way of knowing its declared type. A proxy for that property shouldn't have to initialize and load the discriminator out of the database, a method on the entity should be able to return a static value without causing initialization.