I don’t think that usability and meaning are mutually exclusive. I think meaning comes from careful creation of content (e.g. not written by interns) and sincere business decisions. Usability is the presentation of those pieces into intuitive designs. The problem is when we relegate content as less than design and try to please everyone by offending no one.

It seems that, now days, people forget that UX goes beyond usability (e.g. color palettes and Fritts’ Law) and delight (e.g. Easter eggs). We can make IMDb and Facebook more usable and more delightful, but some delightful and very usable things are missing the meaning such as Google+ (not the best example but the only one I can think of right now). Meaning is harder to establish but breeds loyalty.