gravity, by all means, if you placed in the top ten results in Google in under two weeks, you should continue to do exactly what you have been doing.
Your site does not have to spend time in the sandbox if Google does not think it deserves to. It is not a given for all new sites to enter the ‘sandbox’.
SEO forum chatter and blogs used to place huge ephasis on META tags. Now you’ll see many sites doing just fine without meta tags. However anything that is a bad practice across the board, is still relevant to your META tags (do not spam).
But I’d say do what you are doing, develop your own theories and strategies based off of your own work and experiments. Read around, but don’t read too much you’ll get a different answer everytime you look.
Good luck.