Does the Fairchild Metroliner have any unusual handling characteristics?
Your question is basically asking for opinions. That said, I'll give you mine plus a bit of objective information. I flew SA-226 and SA-227 Metroliners for about two years, commuter flying (4 to 8 legs a day), mostly in U.S. Pacific Northwest weather, two pilots, no autopilot.

The Metroliner was considered by many to be a high workload, unforgiving aircraft. See this for more on that, but I did not find it unreasonably so. However, anytime you have a high work load, fast aircraft, the potential for incidents/accidents gets a little greater than if either of those things is not true.

It was not an airplane that you could get consistently good landings in if you consider a good landing one that is smooth (whatever that means). Clunkers greatly outnumbered greasers, at least for me. The tires were small and hard, and in my opinion the long landing gear magnified clunkers. You could increase your chances of a greaser by carrying a lot of power onto the runway, but that used a lot of runway.

Nose wheel steering was hydraulically actuated via the rudder pedals. It was not uncommon for the system to be inoperative, and the aircraft could be dispatched without it, in which case you had a castoring nose wheel. New captains dreaded being dispatched with inoperative nose wheel steering. Once you got used to it though, it was no problem. In fact, if you had to do some really fancy maneuvering on the ramp, you could turn off the nose wheel steering and if need be pivot about a main gear.

Far from any aerodynamic deficiency, at least in my opinion, it was great in that respect in that it was fast, but had the ability to slow down quickly.
Controllers liked it (and took advantage of this) that it could fly at jetliner approach speeds from the outer marker inbound until short final. Controllers at SFO would often put us between jetliners going down final, or from a left downwind for 28L clear us from that downwind for an asap short final knowing that we could do it. We would touch down beyond where the jetliners did but still in time to make the turnoff to what was then the commuter ramp. When you dropped the gear and flaps and brought the props back to an almost flat pitch with no power, it quickly slowed and/or came down.