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I look at MUDs like this almost in the same way I would look at a tire sitting on a store shelf as a car. It's just a component, not an actual finished product. A lot of MUDs are just stock or completely-uninspired crud. I've tried out well over 850 MUDs (quit counting around 800, and lately I've tried less than in years past...only about a dozen new ones this entire year) and am rarely impressed by what I find.
Most MUDs with newbie schools don't really offer any major code differences that anyone who's played a MUD before hasn't encountered and understands. And the number of completely new players that enter the MUDding community probably isn't high enough to justify the number of "newbie schools" out there and even if it did, most newbie schools are as you point out of such low quality that just experimenting around can give one a better understanding than they provide ("if you want to go north, type north and you will go north...if you want to go south, type south and you will go south...if you want to go west...." is one of my all-time favorites since I obviously thought that while typing north would allow me to go north, typing south would take me west. That kind of dumber-than-dirt redundancy gets old fast).
As for color, I'm starting to believe that a lot of MUDs are run by color-blind people. :-D That's really the only explanation aside from a massive lack of aesthetic taste.
Again, the last three aren't really "features" of a MUD, they're features of a stock codebase. And stock is a pretty good description of a lot of the MUDs out there. I always like to bastardize Harlan Ellison (himself bastardizing Theodore Sturgeon, but Ellison is far more cynical so I like his figure better) by saying that "99% of MUDs are crud, but then again, 99% of everything is crud." Looking over the offerings out there, it's true. And sometimes, as far as some things in life are concerned, I think 1% might be too generous. MUDs and video games in general probably fall into that category.
Take care,
Jason
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