I agree with everything you've written here. Earlier, I thought that hacks should be entire directories, but now that I think about it more, if a hack spans multiple files, it should probably be broken into multiple hacks (for example, your JSON parser is two hacks -- the parser combinator, and the JSON parser built using the combinator).
How will meta-data be transfered? One option that I can think of is to just put it at the top of the file containing the hack. If it's just a list of data, "compiling" it won't be a problem when the hack is loaded.
However, that doesn't really work for hacks distributed as patches. So, another option would be to have the info distributed as a file with the same name as the hack, but a .info extension (or .meta, or something along those lines).
