Just read today's notes on the current state of the Tools and their respective directions. Hurrah all, I love them, especially SchemaExport. Thank you.

Couple comments:

1. I very definitely use SchemaUpdate during development; SchemaUpdate forces a drop of the whole thing, so I have to reload a large dataset even if I've only changed a wee bit of some unrelated class. SchemaUpdate solves this problem nicely, so please don't drop it. :)

2. my project mappings are a mixture of preexisting read-only tables with enterprise-wide data and regular purpose-built tables for my own app classes. Mapping the read-only tables with hibernate too has proved to be the most painless way of dealing with them, but of course they don't need to be continually dropped/regenerated.
Right now I get around this by hand-munging the exported schema before feeding it to the db. If I get sick of doing this and modify schemaExport to skip tables flagged "dontExport='true'" or some such, would y'all be interested in a patch, and what would be the best syntax for supporting this in the .hbm files?

(this is all in 2.0x. Haven't gotten up the nerve to shift over to 2.1betas yet, though all that new good stuff looks tempting.)

-- R.