I had asked the original question here: http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/flexcoders/message/62626
And received several helpful responses involving the ArrayElementType metadata tag. This works for the case of dealing with types of objects in arrays, but doesn't resolve the more general question of why does Flex2 throw out metadata information, and only allow prevention of it being thrown out in debug mode? Basically, we would like to use metadata much as Java 1.5 uses annotations for a handful of scenarios. This is entirely possible, and works really well, but only if you use an obscure compiler flag, and then only in debug mode. Anyone have any ideas?