I'd like to add value.

Yes every month someone does suggest that Hibernate should be able to 
do remote lazy loading. And the arguments against are valid.

However I think that we need to look at this as a challenge. Look how 
far we have come in the last 10 years with Java and ORM.


If I have a tiered platform with the client co-located with the 
server, things work nicely. But what if I need to move the client tier 
into a DMZ. I'd like to NOT have to make drastic changes to my 
application.

There must be solutions to this because people are hand coding such 
things. What about an extension framework that supports a number of 
the most common, manually coded solutions. Optimistic locking is an 
example of a solution to a problem where you have made some tradeoffs. 
I'm sure there are a few solutions to this problem, with trade offs 
that many people would be willing to make - to get the benefits that 
come with it.