I can’t help feeling you’ve too tight a deadline for this one. The questions you’re asking are answered in design papers, in reviews, in The Craft of Adventure, in posts, in Usenet… we’ve been living side by side with the difference between oldschool and modern - with the knowledge of what to use and what not to use (mazes and hunger timers are, nowadays, out) and what to marvel and gawk at (Nord And Bert Couldn’t Make Head Nor Tail Of It remains unique to this day, with only a couple of games following in its footsteps). It’s the sort of thing you’d need to spend some time in the community for. Jimmy Maher’s excellent History of IF would certainly be one of THE things to read. So is IF Theory Reader.
A bit of both plus a dash of “There’s so little done yet, there’s no such thing as bad design”.
But in the case of the puzzle being discussed - bad design.
As far as I can tell - and it’s certainly my opinion - that mostly old text adventures suffer from what is today considered bad design, for a number of reasons. Reason #1: Adventure did it. Adventure had mazes, light puzzles, inventory limit, huge number of rooms… let’s add all that in.
Another big reason was “value for money”. You paid for that game; you expected it to be worth your while. That usually meant length of game, not quality. Level 9 went WAAAAY overboard with number of rooms in one of their games, and failed to implement them properly, resulting in a 2000+ room boring maze, for all practical intents.
And again, they were doing it for the first time. There was no “good design” to check their design against, because there was mostly no design at all.
Again, this is the sort of thing we’ve discussed so much it’s pretty much overhead for most of us, we don’t even think about it…
But my point: NO, old text adventures aren’t just considered bad design lessons. They had good qualities - some of them, anyway (realise that at one point, there were as many crappy z80 adventures as there were crappy FPSs in the '90s). Some can even be enjoyed by modern gamers. But it’s all in a case-to-case basis.
Thankfully, not yet. If it had, it would be pretty stagnant. No, there’s lots of creative people here - why, just last month Jon Ingold tried to do away with the parser while retaining the feel of IF.
And then there’s greedy people like me, who like nothing better than to play the games and post reviews.