The big elephant in the room is that this isn't really about metaprogramming. It's about the failure of the text as a means for manipulating of computer program

The big elephant in the room is that this isn't really about metaprogramming. It's about the failure of the text as a means for manipulating of computer programs (e.g. eval on strings, reflection, method_missing, _getattr_, etc). It would be as if we represented and manipulated numbers as text strings. Much like languages have more successful ways of representing numbers, some languages are more successful at metaprogramming. In particular, Lisp takes the view that the act of metaprogramming is really the act of writing application-specific compiler extensions. The default behavior simply doesn't involve ripping apart strings and concating them back together.