Michael, The result of your labors is to reduce this to the observation that Aegis does not handle a circular object graph. Hibernate, indeed, has nothing special to do with it.
When I asked my fellow developers about this on another occasion, the very weak consensus was that adding support for this to Aegis was a questionable idea, and that we should suggest JAXB https://jaxb.dev.java.net/guide/Mapping_cyclic_references_to_XML.html for people who needed this sort of thing. I haven't entirely convinced myself that your case would be covered by this recipe. I'm sorry that you put so much energy into the test case given the outcome. I'm not religiously opposed to coming up with some sort of circle helper for Aegis, but I'm unlikely to find time to do it any time soon. --benson
