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I agree completely with this, but it's impossible, first of all, to actually make a completely accurate historical MUD. Beyond the fact that it'd be an immense amount of work, the accuracy would be stained by the fact that history is far from an exact 'science'.
You might also consider that while adding in Steampunk technology makes a MUD unfaithful to any sort of real history, so does using modern English in it....and nobody can really be expected to put up with the English from the period. It's practically unintelligible to anyone but a linguist.
Trade-offs have to be made for the sake of the end user. The Rennaissance fairs do a good job of it. They munge together all sorts of things (particularly grammatical structures) that didn't exist in the time period they are replicating, and they recognize they aren't really trying to simulate history but simulate an idealized, user-accessible version of it.
--matt
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