There have been some issues coming up with how we handle meta. I think they boil down to users needing a way to control the meta on their dask.dataframe objects.

1. add public methods for setting/getting meta.
2. add meta as a kwarg on all functions so people can optionally specify what their output looks like
3. preserve as much info as possible on meta (things like setting meta to a subset of the data on read).
4. improve error messages so that issues that come up are less cryptic, this will often look like suggesting that users pass meta in as a kwarg.

This idea is kind of related to #8435