Situation (hypotetical). I have (besides the other) two MIDI-devices: sequencer (file reader) and display. Reader reads the text from SMF, the song lyrics. But it can't display it, it can't send it to display, there no exist such messages.
Actually, here is a tricky way to do that, according to MIDI Specifications. We can map meta event "FF 07 ll text (Cue Point)" to MTC RT Cueing message "F0 7F id 05 0E el em nibblized_text F7 (Event Name) F0 7F id 05 0B el em F7 (Cue Point)" (ll - text length, id - device identifier, el, em - event number. Wow!)
Simple map exists for meta "FF 58 (Time Signature)" = SysEx "F0 7F 7F 03 02 (Time Signature)".
But how about the lyrics?
So there is the question: why meta-events are not SysEx-MIDI-events? What is the philosophy?