Well, first of all you can only provide one value for the property "hibernate.hbm2ddl.auto". It is after all a
property and properties can only have a single value. So probably whatever is processing that XML file of which you posted a fragment uses the last value it finds, namely "insert". As far as I can see this isn't even a valid value for the property, but my Hibernate experience is out of date; can you show us a document which suggests that
you should use "insert"?
When I was using Hibernate I just used "create" for that property and Hibernate would create the tables and permit inserts right away. (There's little point in allowing somebody to create a table and then preventing them from inserting records into it, empty tables are pretty useless.)