Q:

Stop special-casing Stack Overflow's meta

Questions about why Stack Overflow does not share rep with Meta Stack Overflow are met with the response that meta.stackoverflow and stackoverflow do not share a "parent-child relationship" like the other meta sites. For example, this response:

Stack Overflow isn't in a parent-child relationship with Meta Stack Overflow like the other sites are with their respective sites. Meta Stack Overflow is intended to handle not only issues with Stack Overflow, but for the Stack Exchange Network as a whole. It is also the specific place to ask questions about Data Explorer, Area 51, and Careers which otherwise lack their own meta sites and even reputation in some cases. In essence - Meta Stack Overflow is the site for all of the Stack Exchange Network. Tying reputation to Stack Overflow would undermine that, since not everyone who knows the engine is particularly active on Stack Overflow.

This just raises the question: Why doesn't Stack Overflow have a "real" meta (with a "parent-child" relationship) like the other Stack Exchange sites? Why is it treated as a special case? The closest thing I've seen to an explanation is this bit from the New Per-Site Metas blog post:

For now we are leaving meta.stackoverflow.com grandfathered in, as-is, with no changes; it’s still a standalone community with a standalone reputation system. We think Stack Overflow is large enough to justify this, and it just so happens that Stack Overflow is also the name of the company, too. Meta Stack Overflow will serve as the “National Capital” where we process feedback not just for Stack Overflow but for the core engine itself — while the smaller meta sites are akin to regional or state capitals.

But this is a really unsatisfying explanation as it doesn't really stand up to reason. How does the fact that Stack Overflow is large justify the lack of a "real" meta site? If anything, shouldn't the fact that it's large actually mean the opposite: that its meta should not have some purpose?
Update
Despite all of the negativity towards this suggestion, it looks like it actually got implemented: Announcing The Launch Of Meta Stack Exchange

A:

Update
As the relevant communities grew, this did start to make sense. And three years later, we did implement it.

How does the fact that Stack Overflow is large justify the lack of a "real" Meta site?

This is a reasonable question. You probably won't like the answer...
SO is large, and SO was first. SO is large in part because SO was first, but there are several other factors involved that contribute to its size - suffice to say, it's unlikely any other SE site will achieve anything close to the scale of SO anytime soon.
Because SO is large, and because SO was first, many issues arise on SO that don't affect the other SE sites at all, only occur on them after they've been active for a significant amount of time, or occur simultaneously but get noticed on SO first. So chances are, if you're encountering a problem on CatFanciers.SE, it's already been encountered, reported, discussed, and perhaps even resolved on SO.
An excellent example of this is the wiki FAQ: this started on SO, was migrated to Meta, and then gradually modified and expanded to cover SE as a whole.
Now sure, the SO/SE team could create another meta site for SO, move this one to ubermeta.stackexchange.com, and then manually migrate new questions from the SO meta to the global meta when it becomes apparent that they're globally-relevant... But why? What does adding more work solve, apart from consistency for the sake of consistency?
There's nothing wrong with consistency. It would probably reduce some small amount of confusion on the part of new users, but whether or not this would make up for the additional confusion of sending users to yet another meta site when they have questions is debatable. And most importantly, the current system doesn't require any additional effort - it's already done, paid for long ago, its cost amortized over time. It's not enough that a feature could be implemented - it needs to offer a compelling benefit to offset the cost of implementation.

A:

There are two primary reasons.

It's grandfathered in - after several years of this usage it makes little sense to change it out simply because it doesn't match all the other meta sites
It's the crucible for the Stack Overflow engine itself - Stack Overflow, being the largest and most used site, generates the most usable data regarding the design of the engine used on all the other sites

If you build machines that other people use, then it makes sense to place the corporate offices near the largest user of your machines.
Furthermore, but probably less importantly, the site to which this meta is attached is composed of programmers* who are probably well suited to debugging, analyzing, and presenting problems in a manner that the site owners will be able to understand and respond to easily.  If Jeff & Co. were ice skaters, it would probably be better if the crucible site was dedicated to ice skating so problems could be presented within the knowledgespace the site builders are familiar with.
Plus we're curmudgeonly like that.
*AI simulants built by Jon Skeet

A:

If I understand it correctly, meta.SO is really meta.SE -- it's the meta for all sites. The only reason it's not at meta.SE is that meta.SE already exists -- it's the meta for SE1 sites. Rather than evict the existing meta.SE, they just left meta.SO alone, but it's intended as the meta for all SE-wide issues. The first part of the explanation you posted was a little weak (the part about "Stack Overflow is large enough to justify this"), but the second part explained it well:

Meta Stack Overflow will serve as the “National Capital” where we process feedback not just for Stack Overflow but for the core engine itself — while the smaller meta sites are akin to regional or state capitals.

