Thank you, Razor42. You have more or less said it all perfectly. I only wish the metadata option could be included in all products. I would say it should remain an option rather than a requirement, simply because not everybody wants to use it. 

At the DAZ Store all products made recently for DAZ Studio have metadata included. The staff at DAZ 3D is actively working to create metadata for the older products as well, and much of it has already been done. I recently had to reset my downloads for a product that was deleted from my hard drive. The original did not have metadata, but the reset did.

Many products have metadata as a separate downloadable file, which to me is how it should be. There are a lot of the recent products that have it built in, and it automatically installs when the product installs. When you open DAZ Studio after installing 1 or more products, a window appears that lists the new metadata that has been added. You can accept it as it is, or you can tell it what you want it to do with it.

Either way the metadata can be allowed to exist, or you can opt it out if you wish. I personally always keep it, simply because it makes finding what I want a lot easier than scrolling through hundreds of products to get to the one I want. My workflow goes much faster because of this.