Merging of accumulo.metadata tablets

We have a situation where the number of tablets exploded for the accumulo.metadata table. I expect at some point the tablet size got set too low. When trying to merge the tablets however the command reports back that you cannot do that for the accumulo.metadata table. This is very problematic. We need a way to be able to fix this system with having to manually muck with the accumulo.root table entries.

Accumulo.2.1.x
CentOD 7.3

Start by reproducing the tablet-merge command failure for the accumulo.metadata table in Accumulo 2.1.x and trace where that operation is rejected. Determine how the current workflow handles metadata and root-table entries. Done means the tablet count can be safely corrected without manually editing accumulo.root entries.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.