Metadata documents may contain Documentation, ValueAnnotation and TypeAnnotation elements that quite increase the size of the document.
It is desirable for (especially mobile) clients to control the size of the response and include e.g. only annotations of vocabularies the client can understand.
This may be done via headers (Prefer, Accept?), system query options, or by exposing $metadata as an OData service itself, see ODATA-126:
GET ~/$metadata/EntityTypes('Model.Person')?$expand=Annotations
Ideally combined with filtering on expanded entities, see ODATA-32.