Taking a step back, what would also work is that "collection&&element" is always filtered prior to invoking ImplicitNamingStrategy (and not only in some invocations as today) and then expose the information whether that path represents a collection element via a separate member on the passed AttributePath. Much nicer than String fiddling on the implementor side. For the sake of compatability, we could also leave the magic value in there where it's passed today and pass that info additionally via that new member on AttributePath. In 6.0, we'd remove any passing of the magic String value to implicit naming strategies.