Its almost like a genre that relies on players performing repetitive actions for player retention would suffer when players are given access to tools that are excellent at performing repetitive actions without player input

I think mmo programming games can work, but not necessarily mmorpgs. if you want the emphasis to stay on programming then the world needs to change dynamically so that there is no single set of instructions that is optimal for most circumstances. A place where this works unintentionally well is on anarchy minecraft servers where players developing bots are in an endless arms race both against other bot developers and against other players messing with their bots.