I would not oppose some means of allowing authors to add META tags that were honest and accurate and based on human judgment. But if we created META tags by some automated process just to get higher rankings on search engines that still use them, then we would be guilty of manipulation just as other advertisers are.
The process of adding links to an article is a lot like selecting keywords:
Stephen King is a [[horror]] [[author]] ...
Not using this information to make life easier for some search engines seems like a waste. On the other hand, I doubt that other search engines than Google really matter nowadays, and I agree that meta tags depend a lot on honesty, which makes them notoriously unreliable.
Regards,
Erik