Turns out this is a bug. I loosened up my search criteria and found that this is already a reported bug:
http://opensource.atlassian.com/projects/xdoclet/browse/XDT-1349
However the fix is applied to version 1.3 which is not yet stable, at least for my purposes (from my quick experience documented below).
The good news is that the fix only involved commenting out 3 lines in hibernate-properties.XDt (see the problem report above for details).
All is well, isn't open source a great thing :)
- Richard