Currently, the method AbstractASTTransformation#getMemberClassValue takes as a parameter a "default value" (parameter defaulted to null), which is returned if the annotation instance does not provide a value for that parameter. This means that if an annotation is declared with a "default Foo.class", that expected default value is not taken into account, and the value returned to AST transformations is null.
As the core structure of annotations provides for setting a default, it is exceedingly surprising for the default not to be respected and to have to be manually resolved by any transformation using it. I propose that as a breaking change for 4.0, if an annotation provides a default value and an instance of the annotation does not override that value, then that default value should be returned by the getMember*Value methods.
