It does seem that Envers can set the Catalog/Schema based on its global configuration on a user supplied revision entity, but to add this does introduce a backward compatibility concern for existing applications. Such a change ultimately would require that we introduce a configurable option that enables this behavior, making this opt-in.

Given that one can modify the @Table annotation and that being a conscience decision to place the entity in the audit schema, is that truly any different than introducing this configurable option to accomplish the same?

The only benefit I truly see out of the configurable option is that it keeps the configuration of the default audit schema/catalog in one place; however, how often does one truly change such a setting anyway and therefore is it really that critical?