The topic of ranged weapons have come up a number of times over the last 9 or so years I've been playing here (well, one person in particular seems to keep requesting them... Bacrie?). The main points against implementing it are:

1) There are many one-way exits which you could easily fire a weapon into, and your target would have no way of getting to you.

2) There are many mobs which should not move... cabal guards and guild guards come to mind. Are they supposed to sit idly by while you pelt them with arrows from 10 feet away?

3) Imagine if everybody in the mud had call lightning with no timer on it... since it is an aggressive ability with little to no risk, it would become more of a nuisance than a tactical advantage.

It would be alot easier to add ranged weapons in a new mud design than to slap it into the mud as it exists now. The way things are now, it would horribly break many aspects of the game with little to no real benefit to the playerbase or game balance.

As to your question about making the ranged weapons usable while in the same room as your target... I'm not sure what the use of that would be. Rangers can already serpent strike, pugil, kick, etc while in combat. In order to get special arrow attacks, that would assume you are not swinging a weapon (since the weapon damages you get from the bow assume you are already plucking off shots). We would need to take out the swinging capability of an exotic bow weapon to justify adding special shots. Making any changes to allow ranged weapons, without a major revamp, would really just be a half-assed effort that wouldn't really add anything to the mud in my opinion.