I've screwed up too many patches by taking a bunch metasurface snapshots, forgetting newly created contraptions that were not meant to be included in them, always resulting in a lot of confusion. Parameters for all contraptions should be left unchecked in the metasurface by default! Or at least we need this option. The way it currently behaves is absolutely counter-intuitive to me.
I understand that for new users having it behave this way quickly shows how the metasurface works without too much head-scratching, but it's not practical at all if you get in the habit of fine-tuning intricate patches made up of dozens and dozens of contraptions. It's fine if setting up the metasurface is the very last thing you do in a patch, but I doubt anyone really works that way. I'm always adding new contraptions, and having to uncheck their parameters is an added worry I could do without.