Programming with metaclasses does seem a bit scary; just how much indirection do we need in a program?

Normally, an essential part of software development is class design and those classes are usually fixed for the duration of the program. By contrast, metaclasses create classes dynamically. A common use of metaclasses is to provide optional 'aspects' to basic classes, such as logging and debugging.

I tend to stay away from metaclasses because it is harder to debug such programs. I tend to instead derive subclasses that contain the extra functionality needed so that I have multiple concrete classes: with debugging, without debugging, etc. It is more source code, but the class members are explicit and easy to see.

Then again, I may be a metaclass Luddite :)