Polish the metaballs system, allow modifiers and convert to mesh of single objects

Metaballs are very limited now in Blender. First of all, you can't add modifiers to them. As requested in other ideas, why don't just add the modifier "convert to mesh" so that one can use all the other modifiers on an object? This should be applied to metaballs as well.

I mean, not only you are not allowed to add modifier, so to have the chance to decimate the polycount, but you can't even have a backup of the metaball object, because when you duplicate the metaball object, and then convert one of the two to mesh, Blender will convert ALL the metaball objects to mesh, leaving you no chance to backup the metaball system, other than copying it to an external file. Which makes no sense imho.

The metaball system should be polished.