Making MUDs seems hard

Here's one annoying thing I've noted: It's hard to start an interesting atypical MUD.

I've been thinking of starting a whole new kind of a multiplayer game. It might work as a web-based game, or ones with dedicated clients, but I think it would be best as something kind of like BattleTech: The Frontier Lands - a text-based MUD with an optional graphical frontend.

Anyway, starting writing something new is a daunting task. It seems to me that most MUD servers these days either assume too much about the underlying game, or require too much ripping apart to start from the clean table.

For me, an ideal starting point would be something that had

• Pre-made functionality for characters, rooms, inanimate objects and mobs (provided the game doesn't assume mobs behave in any way)
• No programming knowledge needed to create those
• A sane scripting language that allows expansion of everything

I've looked at LPMud derivants, which have kind of a sane scripting language, but most of the mudlibs are too intricate for this, and even if only marginal code use is needed, technically building areas needs writing code.

I also looked at MUCKs, which allow just about everything in this list in an elegant way, except that the MUF scripting language is just plain awful. (Multi User Forth? Has sounded quite unexciting to me for a long time!)

So what might I do? Write the whole MUD from scratch? Perhaps that would be the easy way - though that needs a lot of basic groundwork done, and that's just plain boring.