[KaVir]

I share that desire, but I'm primarily a server developer, and my time is a finite resource. I would rather customise a popular, well-established and feature-rich client that's already had decades of hard work poured into it than create yet another mud client from scratch.

And how many of those custom clients can match the features offered by the big clients?

Throwing away decades of feature development? That sounds like a step backwards to me.