There is a placeholder answer over at the unofficial guide with a link to an article which (to me) seems quite unrelated.
I use XJC to generate my JAXB classes and while most of them map to each other as expected, some elements get mapped to JAXBElement<Foo>. This is most annoying for graphs with cycles, where sometimes the parent node of a Foo element will be the JAXBElement<Foo>, which doesn't itself have a parent property, breaking the cycle.
I can think of various workarounds, but it would be much nicer if someone could explain this behaviour to me. Why does JAXB sometimes map a <Foo> element to JAXBElement<Foo> instead of Foo?