Can someone describe the term Meta?

There are so many things that have 2 names for the same thing but you use the one term when Hex editing and the other one when doing something else like Float and Single.

My guess is that Meta is the raw data of an object.

In memory editing you could change the pointers from 1 object to the next one so you could transform MC into an Grunt regardless of the memory block size.Is that also possible with hex editing?

Meta swapping is better than that I guess because you can extract/inject Meta's across maps.