I'm not sure that playing on very few muds necessarily has much effect on whether you can create a mud decently or not. It all depends on what you're trying to create. I've only played on 4 muds really...2 typical hack&slash ones (before I discovered that other types exist), a sort of hybrid mud which is mostly hack&slash with a few nifty RPish type things added on, and finally my favorite, a classless, level-less mud with vast RP potential.
If I want to make my own mud, it's gonna be one of the type I'm playing now, not some hack&slash piece of junk. I suppose there's things I could learn from them, like how to do a more interesting combat system for instance, but I'm not gonna go out and play 50 muds I can't stand when I already have plenty of ideas for innovative stuff. Maybe my ideas are playable, maybe they're not, but either way I wouldn't really know until I had actual players in there giving me feedback. Most people don't like the intricate stuff I like so I wouldn't have many players regardless, but I'd rather have a few players who like what I like thatn 5000 players who just wanna kill stuff anyway.
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