[Halfdeck]

The only case when a description meta may hurt is if you use identical ones under one domain. Google may list those pages as "similar pages."

As already mentioned, the TITLE/description metas are not only SEO tools...they should be human friendly (i.e. avoid too much capitalization and boring descriptions).

Also, some big sites do some of their branding with their title/description, so even if surfers read past your SE listings, they'll see your site name over and over again (one good example I can think of is Freeones, which comes up alot for babes' names).

I personally don't put too much weight on descriptions. If I think there's sufficient on-page text with decent keyword density for a targetted key phrase, I might decide not to bother with meta tags at all. If I'm in a hurry, sometimes I just cut a part of the page text and insert that into my description.