Grails 2 does change the reloading agent to a custom one from SpringSource compared to previous versions - https://github.com/SpringSource/spring-loaded . Hopefully that does take away much of the code reloading woes.

Also, you are not restricted to hibernate since the GORM stuff has been refactored and now supports new hotnesses like MongoDB and Redis - https://github.com/SpringSource/grails-data-mapping