[radley]

Forgive me for asking, but are these settings really relevant? You've said you don't use the Save for Web feature which is Photoshop 101 for optimizing web images.

What you're describing sounds to me like someone recommending Text Edit, Apple Script, and Automator to do Unix commands because they didn't know Terminal was in the Utilities folder.

All the extra stuff you don't like are used by design studios. The metadata keeps track of the color profile, thumbnails, comments, and other metadata commonly used for managing large libraries of images.

[ck2]

"Save For Web" has the exact same problem and makes no difference unless the user is proactive and adjusts settings, the defaults are just as bad as the regular "save as".

When doing "Save For Web" Photoshop disables subsampling for Maximum and High (the default) and also does not enable progressive by default. It also adds meta.