[KaVir]

Are you sure you're not talking about generated descriptions? A dynamic description can be generated or hand-written, and I've yet to see a static description that couldn't be improved by having dynamic elements added to it. The only drawback of dynamic descriptions is that they increase the amount of work, but if you didn't want to invest time and effort into your descriptions I'm guessing you wouldn't bother writing any at all (some muds do take this approach as well, although I'm not fond of it).

Imagine an author with no literary skill or talent writing a book. Yuck.

Generated or hand-written, a bad description is still a bad description. But hopefully a mud with hand-written descriptions would recruit builders that produce at least passable resuls - just as a mud with generated descriptions would hopefully implement a system that produced at least passable results.

Sure, but they're also interactive games. I think there are clear benefits in making muds feel more immersive, and tailoring the descriptions to the viewer is an effective way of doing that.

Generated descriptions shift the effort - there's still quite a lot of work involved, but once the system is in place you can leave it to create most of the descriptions for you (depending on how much of it is generated of course - you may well want to incorporate hand-written elements into many of the descriptions as well). On the other hand, dynamic hand-written descriptions will increase your workload, although personally I think the results can be worthwhile.

It does open doors though - for example if you want descriptions to reflect what the PCs actually look like (as opposed to what they say they look like), generated descriptions can change on-the-fly to reflect shapechanging, wounds, worn equipment, and so on. This means that looking at someone actually gives you reliable and useful information about them.

In my first mud, most people left their descriptions blank, or filled them with ASCII art, offensive messages or combat logs. Perhaps its different for roleplaying muds, particularly those where people take great pains to write out lengthy descriptions and background stories - but for my style of game (where there is no roleplaying and no rules) I felt the benefits far outweighed the drawbacks, and I've yet to hear a single complaint about it.