I think in most cases metaprogramming makes applications much harder to read. When taking over someone else's codebase, I don't want to also have to understand

I think in most cases metaprogramming makes applications much harder to read. When taking over someone else's codebase, I don't want to also have to understand how they modified the grammar of the language. Obviously, this isn't a blanket statement - metaprogramming has some amazing success stories (homebrew and vagrant both have excellent DSLs), but more often than not I appreciate code that's just "one layer" of abstraction.