One of the really nice things I found about MUDs was how surprisingly accessible they were for creating your own content. I taught myself to program on an LPMUD, and the multi user nature of MUDs taught me a fair bit about optimising code, even for simple class abilities for characters, since they were typically run on underpowered boxes that people had brought in and dumped on a university network, and when players find out that some times can make the server chug for everyone else by using abilities, they will and encourage others to do so as well :)
Uni taught me a lot about the theory of the things that I'd learned in practice previously through MUDs.
I'm actually still running a MUD (Genesis, the first LPmud) and one of our main issues is that we don't get many new developers who want to help out and code.
Nowdays players just want to play, getting them to go through the extra effort to learn to code and help out developing the world is very hard.
It's also hard to get new players but a web client has really helped with that. Very few new players stick around though. But enough to keep it going.
The lack of developers is probably what will kill the game eventually.
Once you get out into the main world outside the tutorial there is a board you can post an application for wizhood on.
Or just send an in-game mail to me.
Uni taught me a lot about the theory of the things that I'd learned in practice previously through MUDs.