Marc, you make a good point, and I could actually add that myself I used ClassBridges even more frequently than @Transient fields. Also in that case, dirty checking gets disabled as it would likely introduce trouble.

I agree with you that it would be very nice to improve on this, but we need to find a very clean way to express it. We might end up adding the annotation you propose, but it would be even better to avoid that; such a change needs to be discussed on the mailing list, and will take some time to find consensus.

I would love it if we could figure out which fields are being read automatically; problem with such a trick is that direct field reads can't be intercepted easily - it would likely require instrumenting the entities, which is not very nice in terms of usability.

Transient fields generally make it very hard. I think a valid strategy would be to think why/when we want to use them, and propose a better alternative?

Ideas welcome, even better on the mailing list