Well initially Envers was developed by Adam and then Lukasz externally from Hibernate itself. Eventually we brought Envers under the Hibernate ORM project as hibernate-envers. I think it made sense at the time because I did not really like the integration points ORM made available for a project like Envers or even hibernate-envers. But I think those have progressed enough now in some of the more recent releases (thanks to working with and feed from lots of people using them).

So I just think its maybe that those integration points are getting defined well enough to better allow a feature like Envers to be able to "provide itself" on top of a users domain mapping in terms of persistence lifecycle.

And it would certainly help with issues like this one. Eventually I can even see the SessionFactory handing out AuditReaders or maybe a HistoricalSession...