I’ve been burned by metadata platforms twice now and honestly, it’s exhausting.

The demo is always incredible - finally, we’ll know where our data lives! No more asking “hey does anyone know which table has the real customer data?” in Slack at 3pm.

Then reality hits.

Week 1 looks great. Week 8, you search “customer data” and get back 47 tables with brilliant names like `customers_final_v3` and `cust_data_new`. Zero descriptions because nobody has time to write them.

You try enforcing it. Developers are already swamped and now you’re asking them to stop and document every column? They either write useless stuff like “customer table contains customers” or they just… don’t. Can’t really blame them.

Three months in, half the docs are outdated.

I don’t know. Maybe it’s a maturity thing? Or maybe we’re all just pretending we’re organized enough for these tools when we’re really not.