The break down into distinct logical and physical naming strategies is something we have discussed for 5.0. I do not know if that has been implemented or not.

ObjectNameNormalizer itself is something I'd like to see done differently in 5.0 overall. It was added for JPA 2.0 with the addition of the ability to say that all db identifiers should be quoted ("delimited"). ObjectNameNormalizer handles that quoting. The work done in metamodel (5.0) make that much easier to apply consistently; much easier compared to what I had to do with the old org.hibernate.mapping code which is where/why ObjectNameNormalizer came to be.

ObjectNameNormalizer.NamingStrategyHelper is part of that, meant to help with implicit (i.e., app un-specified) versus explicit (i.e., app specified) names. Notice that NamingStrategyHelper is passed to most of the ObjectNameNormalizer methods. Its role is to delegate the calls to the appropriate NamingStrategy methods as needed and interpret the results. Again, the goal is that NamingStrategy would be better split up in 5.0.

ObjectNameNormalizer.NamingStrategyHelper is meant to handle logical/physical naming. That is very different from implicit/explicit naming.