There is also HHH-6615 - int type in Revision number Open which ties back into revision entity structure changes. I wonder if it would make sense to try and tackle these together.

I do think we may be able to control this behavior by some bootstrap configuration property that would initially be disabled to continue with this old behavior but would need to be toggled manually by users. At some designated future release, we'd make the new behavior the default and issue a bootstrap warning when the old behavior was still enabled.