Glad to see someone post this. I laughed when I saw this article and some of the comments here. I laugh at most games which think they are "complex" or "challenging", whatever. Go play a MUD, one of the hard ones, get back to me.
I had a friend whose character figured out how to put on a hockey mask, take out a chainsaw, and then hack off your limbs and give your limbs back to you - this was by coding from within the game, sort of.
MUs are to games with graphics as books are to movies. In a modern game, you're limited to whatever art the designers put into the game. In a MU, you can create whatever persona you would like. It's also a small enough community to where you can have a major impact on the worlds you play in, if you so desire.
Uni taught me a lot about the theory of the things that I'd learned in practice previously through MUDs.
It's also hard to get new players but a web client has really helped with that. Very few new players stick around though. But enough to keep it going. The lack of developers is probably what will kill the game eventually.
Is there any info for developers wanting to contribute? I looked around the site and didn't see anything mentioned.