Jean,
You're using 2.1. I can see that from your schema definition. Are you sure you're on seam 2.2? I think 2.1 will work for me if I switch back.
Also, do you use the elment
<persistence-unit-ref>
I found the problem. Two issues:
1- The out-of-the-box build.xml has issues. It does not resolve properties in build-${profile}.properties when exploding or making a war. I updated the build.xml to do token replacement of values in properties files.
2- there is a value in dev profile action.dir
that's set to dev. So my classes were being copied there and Hibernate was not finding them. Hence, the root cause of the issue that no properties table exist is fixed. Once I updated the build.xml and classes were copied under WEB-INF/classes instead of WEB-INF/dev. All is good.
I cannot believe it took a week to figure this out. So many hours wasted but I guess I learned a good deal.
Thanks for your help!