Understanding how WP treats keywords?

sheesh…trying to reduce confusion level.

From what I’m in the process of gathering, stock wp drops mt_keywords on the floor unless you specifically define a custom field to do something with them. True so far?

Other than for in-site navigation, like post tags or a tag cloud, (which I want to explore later) my burgeoning understanding is that there’s not a lot of value with keywords anyway, (at least post keywords) because current SEs either devalue them or don’t have any use for them. True also?

I have been away from any kind of content creation for several years and don’t know much about seo but what I *think* I understand is that keywords just aren’t very important if at all. True also? (I think I just asked the same question twice ??

It *appears* that with some gnashing one can use Jerome’s keywords + Robin Lu’s mod to xmlrpc.php (which I’d rather not do – not scared of it but I won’t be able to remember all this next upgrading) I can get Ecto (which I use 99% of the time) to recognize Jerome’s keywords but I suppose what I’m asking is, is there any point to doing all that? (except for the purposes of in-site usage)

I can see in Ecto’s log that mt_keywords are being sent, but wp doesn’t return them and basically ignores them. Since Ecto does the right thing, Adriaan has pointed out that it’s a wp issue, not Ecto’s. But I’m not sure if I should even care right now.

Blurp. I don’t know what I’m asking and am going around in circles. Put me out of my myserie! ?? Illuminate!