status was just an example, not saying that we must include it? Regarding showing the link/path, I agree it's redundant which is my I'm not a big fan of Hyermedia (HATEOS).  I just think the option to add metadata at the root level is important without breaking changes.  If you later add  { 'metadata': {} }, we need to add a root node for the object which will break things if there is no root node now.