It's not really related to the stateful/stateless discussion we were having, but that needn't stop us continuing (this thread http://forum.springframework.org/showthread.php?t=51174 might have been closer, except for the misunderstanding about the nature of a step).

ExecutionAttributes in the JobExecution is a good idea - it was one of the approaches we were considering. When we designed the ExecutionContext framework we sort of anticipated that that might end up being stored at the job level as well.

This feature won't make it into 1.0 now, but there will be workarounds (e.g. copying attributes between steps in a step listener).