The comments I had sent to Crimefighter were a very general outline of the different strategies used in various MUDs. Since I
never saw any of Terrafirma's, Northern Lights' or pDirt's code,
I could only go by the info that people were willing to share.
You're right, a simple script language can make things much easier for people who are unfamiliar with coding in general. Nevertheless the code will most likely not be bug-free and a coder will have to
verify everything is ok before it can be installed.
From my own(!) experience I can say that I'm usually faster writing own code than trying to understand other people's code and tracking down the potential problems. Having builders write code themselves may lift some work off the coders, but not overly much.
People needn't necessarily have code access to write specials on other MUDs either. Designs like NL and pDirt allow to put the code directly in the zonefile, all that is required is a good documentation about the interface to the MUD (just like the script language has to be documented).
As you say yourself, Terrascript can do whatever the library provides and if that is not enough, the library can be expanded. That in the end means that for exotic code, the coders have to expand the library and then have to deal with quest code again.
Most well-written AberMuds use up less than 1% CPU usage even on slow machines. So the loss of speed that an interpreter causes is unlikely to cause lag for players, because lag occurs mostly due to net congestion rather than high CPU load. It's still slower than compiled code. It would be interesting to have a comparison about the efficiency of code among the various MUDs, rather than a chart about each MUD's size, but I guess it is impossible to do because they all run on different machines.
Nevertheless it's a fine piece of work and a great progress in the way AberMUDs are coded. Hopefully some other MUDs will also invent
interesting concepts rather than using the old-fashioned methods.
In that case I'd probably write a more complex overview about the different approaches in a future newsletter.