I think you misunderstood me (or maybe I'm still misunderstanding you). I was suggesting that we change all of our classes to not cache the return value from the bean and always call the bean. If other people want to code differently then we won't be able to prevent them caching and hence missing updates. But that's their choice.
The examples you use, e.g., useAlternativeOrdering, could perhaps be treated as read-only attributes (can only ever be set once) versus read-write, and still hidden by the bean. For instance, if there's no setter defined then it has to be one that can only be defined at start-up and not programmatically or when the property file changes (so changes to those properties would be silently ignored, or perhaps given a warning message that they are being ignored.)