Do you care about performance? In my experience, N+1 queries are impossible to avoid with hibernate (or any JPA framework, generally). But maybe I’m just using it wrong.
I haven't found that to be the case. In particular I think expecting the ORM to always do the best thing no matter how you use it is folly, ORMs are a tool that you have to take the time to understand in much of their full complexity.
Some would say this makes them a bad abstraction, but to me, data mapping is going to have to happen somewhere, and I would rather be building on someone else's work to write the data mapping for my applications than do it from scratch. You have to know when the ORM is the right tool to use, and when to drop into plain SQL for your querying, because they do not eliminate the need to write SQL, just reduce it significantly.
He has a lot of info on high performance Hibernate and particularly the n + 1 issue.
It should be mostly avoidable.