While you are correct in stating that a player's time is a finite resource that does not increase, there is an important implication that does not follow from this fact. This implication is that a player's time allocation is fixed with regards to playing a mud. One can disprove of this fairly easily with a hypothetical situation: If I usually spend one hour a day reading a book, but I find a mud that I enjoy, I may spend that same hour playing the mud instead. In this case the net time allocation overall is zero, but the net time allocation spent playing muds has increased. The same logic applies to new players starting on a mud, only in a more exaggerated manner.
The underlined conditional is a key point, and the assertion following immediately after it is not correct without its truth. Like I said in my last post though, I know of no surveys that can answer this question.
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