I completely agree that teams often underestimate the metadata challenge during modernization.

One thing I’ve seen repeatedly, though, is that the hardest part isn’t always the metadata itself—it’s the business intent behind it. We can extract mappings, lineage, and transformation logic, but understanding why a rule exists is often much harder than recreating the rule.

In that sense, a canonical metadata model becomes valuable not just as a generation layer, but as a mechanism for surfacing and validating business semantics before migration.

Curious how you’re thinking about capturing that “why” layer alongside the technical metadata.