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I think that depends on the game design - as you say, the initial design may well limit you, but if designed properly I don't see why you couldn't provide a choice of advancement.
Take a game like Fable, for example (a very linear game, but it does provide a reasonable amount of choice as to how you reach the end goal). You can complete each mission through either magic, combat (melee) or skill (ranged/stealth). Each of those three categories then earns its own set of exp which can be spent (along with general exp) to improve your abilities.
Fable is actually pretty well balanced - I found all three skill categories useful, although each tends to be better in certain situations. However the approach of "use what you want to be good at" could easily extend to muds (actually many skill-based muds already do this).
Well obviously it needs to be balanced against other methods of advancement - pretty much any feature can break a game if implemented poorly.
However I don't see a problem with shortening certain goals for different approaches, as long as there are pros and cons for each form of advancement. Most muds have this already to a certain point - player skill, willingness to take risks, time investment and (in some cases) financial investment are all things that speed up your character advancement over a period of X days.
Of course you can fiddle around with the value of each of the above depending on what you're trying to achieve. If your goal is to make money from the mud, then you'd make it so that cash gave the biggest advantage. If you wanted people to invest time into grinding, then you'd make playing time the biggest factor. If you wanted the mud to be focused on playing skill, then you'd likely have quick (but difficult) challenges that players could complete in order to progress very quickly (so that skilled players could advance much faster than unskilled players).
In the case of quests, you'd have to ask yourself what the purpose was in having them. The original poster really wants players to learn how to navigate their way around the world, so he'd probably place a high value on questing - maybe 1.5 to 2 times as fast as killing mobs. That would strongly encourage people to complete the quests, without forcing them - from a players perspective there's a big difference between telling them "You must now change your playing style to do X" and saying "You can now advance much quicker by doing Y".
For most muds I imagine you'd want both approaches to be considered equally viable alternatives, and IMO the best way to do that (aside from balancing it as best you can) is to make each approach give something different. If the goal is "reach level 50", it doesn't mean that every level 50 character has to have the same powers. And I can assure you, even if a "level 50 wombat slayer" is equally balanced with the other classes, making it extra difficult (or time consuming) to reach that goal will make many of the players want it all the more, for the status symbol if nothing else.
Well remorting isn't really any different to new races/classes - they both rely on replay value rather than extended play.
I think it depends. If your game requires 100 hours to complete, then adding 10 levels might give your players an extra 10 hours of play - but an extra class would give them an extra 100 hours of replay. Of course if they then have to do exactly the same things with their new character, they're likely to get bored - but if they have the choice of playing the game in a completely different way, you're effectively giving them a completely new game to try.
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