Writing meta tags is going nowhere

only two matter really. the title tag, around 50-60 characters, main keyword near the front, written so someone wants to click. the meta description, roughly 150-160 characters, a plain summary of what's on the page. the description isn't a ranking factor and google rewrites it a lot, so don't agonise. the change people talk about is probably google rewriting titles more often too, which happens when the title doesn't match the page well.