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Regardless of the relative morality of this, it does not exist for one simple reason: It would be bankrupt before it started.
Imagine I hired a team of builders to help me create a MUD, and paid them standard fare for writers. I would end up paying something like a few bucks a room. Multiply that by thousands and I've already spent several tens of thousands of dollars. Lets be modest (for professional writers) and say you pay $3 a room. Lets continue the modesty and say you only have 5000 rooms in your mud. You're up to $15,000, and haven't even begun to think about a backstory for this world.
Now you have to hire coders, who lets say earn $50 an hour. Depending on the complexity of your MUD, this will cost you anywhere from $20K up to, well, the sky is the limit I suppose. But for modesty's sake, say you have a small game in terms of functionality and only spend $20K.
Now you're in the hole $35,000 and you haven't even begun looking at hardware, bandwidth, legal fees, business fees, and marketing. You're looking at -minimum- $40,000. And thats compiled with extremely conservative numbers. Actual numbers are probably closer to well over $100,000 to hire people at what you call "fair" prices to create a mud.
Luckily, there are lots of people who not only don't feel exploited, but enjoy creating things to enhance the community that they are a part of, regardless of whether someone makes money from it or not. Do you honestly believe the community that a good MUD creates is not existant in commercial muds?
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