I think it's definitely a culture shift for MUDing - I remember the days where exploration and discovery was what made it magical - but that magic's more or less gone after playing 2 MUDs for >10,000 hours each (yikes) and WoW from vanilla through whatever that Arthas expansion was.

In terms of magical moments the first time in the whirlpool would've definitely been exciting 15 years ago. Now exploration is a required task to get back to being competent in the familiar text action rpg gameplay that I still like better than anything else available in 2017. These days the magic is in improbable PKs and dynamic, conflict driven RP.

Pecking out the previous paragraph I was reminded of this story... Before my first "home mud" died the staff tried to shake things up by radically changing gearing, stats, and areas. It just sank like the titanic as they basically obsoleted all their veteran players over the course of a year of hard work (though that wasn't the only issue, extended downtime didn't help either). That situation was probably even more frustrating than attempting to move to a poorly documented mud, because at least new players have a change of scenery to check out.