Related thing to think through is org.hibernate.metamodel.internal.HibernateTypeHelper / org.hibernate.metamodel.spi.binding.HibernateTypeDescriptor.

The idea behind org.hibernate.metamodel.spi.binding.HibernateTypeDescriptor is to model the information ultimately needed to resolve a org.hibernate.type.Type instance; so stuff like an explicit type name, the reflected Java type (which is already swapped to use reflite), etc.

The idea behind org.hibernate.metamodel.internal.HibernateTypeHelper was (originally anyway, still need to look through the code and make sure this is the case) to manage filling in a HibernateTypeDescriptor and to manage propagating the information from a HibernateTypeDescriptor to different places (e.g. to Columns).

But as I integrated the JavaTypeDescriptor I saw a lot of explicit handling for HibernateTypeDescriptor in LOTS of other places. Gail Badner?