Defining a custom column definition can be used to avoid this, but why would you not want to use the features of your database? By using an enum the DB can figure out statistics easier.
Afaict that’s currently not possible: [HHH-16670] - Hibernate JIRA
The alphabetical ordering was brought up before and might be fixed. Try searching for a JIRA issue for this, and if you can’t find one, please consider creating a bug report.
I created an issue for this last week: [HHH-16694] - Hibernate JIRA I didn’t find any previous discussion about this behaviour.