To answer the actual thread question, Meta was created to play the role currently filled by the Wikipedia namespace. We decided to create it around November of 2001.
The idea (at the time) was that Wikipedia was to be exclusively for articles, article discussions and user pages.
All policy, project discussions, disputes, notifications, etc, etc were to be contained on meta.
When the idea of namespaces was born, it was decided that the Wikipedia namespace would be used for "help" type pages only. Meta was still to remain the place for policy/project discussions.
Somewhere around mid 2002 the drift back to doing everything on WP began. This chiefly happened because the drama queens were annoyed that all of their "VITAL" input was not appearing on the WP recent changes page (which was the single most followed page at the time, because it was small enough to be usable.
I sometimes daydream about how much drama would have been avoided if the original goal of Meta has been preserved.
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