I believe this has been fixed in the 2.0.x branch (version 2.0, which is still in Release Candidate state but should be GA release very soon). It is a complete rewrite that comes with a lot of new features, so you may want to watch out for the release 
Maybe this can be easily fixed in the 1.4.x release train if the Spring Data dev leads plan to do a bugfix release at some point. Would you be considering offering a pull-request on master?