Metaprogramming is a curse. At the end of the day an advanced Lisp/Forth programmer (at heart) can't resist the urge to write programs to generate programs that solve their problems rather than just solve the problem directly.
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As an embedded systems (firmware) developer with a comp sci background, I can't seem to resist it. Metaprogramming is like catnip
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It makes perfect sense in embedded systems, especially those that are static. I started forgiving myself for this once I realized that most HDL work is also about "instantiation of patterns". Why not do that for FW as well? Remove all late binding, more room for optimization.
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Maybe a better way to put is that there isn't a lot of room for abstraction on the device, so move it to compile time. Compile model to code, which also makes it possible to test the model independently.
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I'm a one trick pony, but I really like this approach: okmij.org/ftp/tagless-fi
I used it for generating Verilog, and testing/generating cycle-accurate PRU-ICSS machine code.
Moving away from Scheme on to Haskell has made it manageable.