Amen, that's what I say too.  In fact I brought it up in these forums some months ago;  the more general idea of using the telnet standard for various things, not just ANSI negotiations.  As people who read the thread then will assure you, it was met with a combination of ignorant people saying it wouldn't work and less ignorant people pointing out that lots of MUD clients don't even support the telnet protocol (which wouldn't really matter since at worst case scenario they'd just gag them, I defy you to name one modern MUD client which doesn't at least do this much). One idiot even claimed that if you negotiated using the telnet standard, you were opening yourself to hackers :P

I think really the issue is more that the majority of "coders" wouldn't have a ghost of a clue how to even begin--- after all, this wouldn't just be yet another "copy and paste the spell_fireball function and rename it" job which seems to comprise the bulk of most coders' time!