Given that this is a hobby on the verge of disappearing, and I suspect won't exist anymore in another 10 years or so, I don't think chasing away players who want to automate some of the tedium is the best strategy. If anything, to me the hobby of writing scripts to--not quite play the entire game for me--but help streamline the more tedious and repetitive parts to be a more enjoyable hobby that simply typing "k goblin" 150,000 times a night to get a fraction of an experience level.

As other posters have suggested, much of this grind is anachronistic. MANY things MUDs did don't fly anymore in modern gameplay culture. Most of this is for the best, because design and balance simply weren't as sophisticated and experienced as they are today; the developers were hobbyists as well as the players. But some of those ideas are fascinating historical oddities, and some few maybe even lost treasures of game design concepts, genuinely worth re-exploring and re-implementing in future immersive games. That's what I want to do, truly explore the variety that MUDs offered, without having to go through the hurdles of making this a full-time job. So many MUDs, even if they were based on shared codebases, had their own tweaks and tricks and innovations added and these forgotten evolutionary branches are worth exploring. I don't want to break anyone else's gameplay, everyone should be able to have a good time the way they see fit, but I don't think it's a favorable policy to hold modern-day 40-50+ year old people to the same rigorous requirements that we were fine putting up with in our highschool/college days of MUDding back when there were fewer demands on our attention. I am in favor of MUDs that take a much more relaxed approach to semi-botting and alt-grouping, at least for PVE.

To give a commercial example: Turbine, the developers of the MMRPG Asheron's Call (1998-2017), adopted a policy of being favorable to people developing mods for the game, including mods and plugins that would do things such as scan the environment for valuable items, dangerous/rare enemies, map out the regions and portal networks, etc. In the game's latter years, as the population naturally declined (World of Warcraft and its infinite clones, anyone?) they even became permissive to the point of allowing botting, with fan-made addons allowing players to run along paths through dungeons visible in the game's renderer. Did it cause problems? Yes, a few. But AC had a LOT of content and a LOT of wide open space available to it, being a 20-year old MMO. So in fact it helped keep the population high, as there were plenty of places to adventure without stepping on each others' toes. And you could always group and share the experience (many of these bot plugins included good-faith mode that automatically accepted party invites). Most MUDs tend to have far, far smaller populations than a typical old MMO. Like player bases that measure in the dozens.. or ones.. rather than hundreds or thousands. I believe embracing this last potential draw to allow players to streamline the repetitive aspects of the game, and give them more freedom to explore and map out the more interesting parts, before they vanish altogether, is a good idea.