Hibernate just released 3.5.0.Final with a lot of great improvements. See http://in.relation.to/Bloggers/Hibernate350FinalRelease

BTW, this version of Hibernate supports JPA2, and we can convert the connector over to use it - as long as we're backward compatible with existing databases (created by 'Shape 1.0 and 1.1). Hopefully this can reduce our dependency upon Hibernate per se to where the connector is using JPA2 for everything (except maybe configuration, which hopefully we can extract too).