Closing as I don't see this happening: this is too low on our priority list and we can't affort to pay the maintenance cost (dependencies, tests, ...) right now.

The recommended workaround is to use the [programmatic mapping API](https://docs.jboss.org/hibernate/stable/search/reference/en-US/html_single/#hsearch-mapping-programmaticapi). For people really wanting XML at all cost, they can implement an XML parser that delegates to that API.