I've heard alot of people telling me meta tags are useful for search engines, others tell me they have no effect, and some say they are now targeting pages with metatags and ranking them less.... I dont know which is correct, so please enlighten me if you know. thanks!

Absolutely worth "it". Why not?

the discription meta tag is useful if it has the search phrase in it google will display it in results

not much effort to create just don't key word stuff too much

Spending 5 minutes on them is worth them and not more than that.

still important, i always give more important on title and desc tags

i too heard that they are of no use as far as google is concerned. but other SE's may still find them useful.

The "description" meta tag is still used and frequently shows up in search results. It's not clear just how important it is, but for a couple minutes work, why not?

Well it depends upon which META tags are you talking about because Title tags and Description tags are still the important ones and every else META tag is of no use.

Akash