You're kind of missing the point. Metronome isn't there to be the solution to life's problems or a 'Get out of Jail Free' card. It's simply there to be move that a writer can use as an adventure hook. Nothing more.
Here's the thing. There's no guarantee that the characters really want to be wherever Metronome sends them, or do whatever Metronome does, or that they've ever heard of the planet they get sent to (going back to my alternate dimension story).
So ... what you're talking about is somewhat irrelevant to the thread, isn't it? I mean, sure, you
could do all of this with Metronome, but the thing is, this thread is about
creative liberties—the situations in which writers need to suspend or play with canon in order to fit their needs. If you're not talking about Metronome in the context of "a writer can use it to do whatever they want," then ... this probably isn't the best place to talk about it.
To put it another way, right now, you're referring to Metronome as plot development, not as a creative liberty. I was referring to the fact that if you
did use Metronome to avoid needing to take creative liberties, then it's a deus ex machina. From an author's standpoint, it sort of is anyway. After all, sure, the characters don't know what will happen, but
you know. And as such, you can easily use Metronome as a way of circumventing situations that would otherwise have needed explanation. Using it in this way tends to come off as a cop-out because Metronome is a very easy explanation for everything, whereas moves with definite functions are not. That's why I said it's a shortcut: because if you just had other moves to work with, getting to the same end result takes a little more creative thinking than just whipping out a single move and have it produce the result you want to move the story forward or fill in the details.
In other words, the way you're describing Metronome is a concept more suited to a discussion for plot development, but for a discussion concerning creative liberties, it's not quite relevant unless you're talking about how it can be used as a deus ex machina from a writer's standpoint. And from a writer's standpoint, yes, it
is a cop-out, not because it's not a creative liberty in canon but instead because it's a shortcut in storytelling. That was basically my point from the get-go: that using a move that's that unpredictable in canon to do whatever you want isn't as much of a challenge, which is why people go with other moves instead. Moreover, Metronome can't really cover
everything. It can't, for example, explain away a lot of the examples people have mentioned that
are creative liberties. It can really only deal with very specific circumstances in your plot unless you really
do treat it as a deus ex machina-style event. Creative liberties—the ones we're focusing more on throughout this thread—deal more with the universe as a whole, rather than very specific moments.
Or in shorter terms, the thread's about a meta concept, not an in-universe concept. Sure, Metronome's interesting from the characters' point of view, but that really doesn't have much to do with the subject at hand. Discussing it as an actual circumvention to creative liberties, however, would run headlong into what I was saying about how using one move to explain away pretty much everything risks taking away the challenge in writing (not to mention it'd mean that my response to your "you're missing the point" comment would be "actually, I understood exactly what you meant when you brought Metronome up in a discussion about creative liberties").