>Why was that deemed the absolute lowest work that has to be
>done before someone could advance?

I like it because it's educational. It teaches you a lot about how the game is put together which is useful for other things.

For example, if you haven't written an area and don't understand all of the pieces involved, you're probably not competent to run your own quests if they include any sort of custom mobs, objects, or rewards, even given the tools to do so.

>Surely you could base
>promotions on Promotional Efforts outside the game, Quest
>Construction, as well as Artwork and Stories to enrich it.

I'm all about promotions, stories, and artwork, although you don't actually need to be an imm to produce those things, do you?

As far as quest construction... now you're either talking about coming up with the idea for a non-automated quest that will take me a bunch of time to run, or an automated quest that will take me a bunch of time to code. The creative part is by far the easy/fast part in both cases, at least for me.