As a beginner you should not that most major search engines ignore meta tags, except for a few small search engines that won't make much of a difference for your website. The major search engine to try for is (obviosly) google but they, like most large search engines, ignore meta tags.
They might not use it for ranking purposes but they do use the description every now and then as the snippet in the SERPs so this is VERY important! This is your opportunity to get the customer's attention so it should be keyword rich (so they can see it's relevant to their search visual clue) and should be appealing.
You've got a point there, I use meta tags but mostly out of habbit. Could thing it's a good habbit, lol. Though I'm not sure if he knew that, perhaps he did.