Should my game be using verb lists (via statpanels) or input bars as its main method of interaction?
I feel like this is a pretty obvious question if you give it a moment of thought. There are essentially very few cases in which player input should be filtered through simple text commands or command lists, and 99% of the BYOND games that rely on them are doing so in cases where they shouldn't.
Imagine tomorrow you went out and bought Dishonored. Instead of right clicking to shoot your gun, or pressing CTRL to crouch, or selecting Blink via hotkeys and right clicking to teleport, you had to type "shoot" or "crouch" or "teleport," or use your mouse to navigate to the command window and click it. Not only would this ruin immersion, it would probably be debilitating as far as the gameplay is concerned.
Now imagine the game you're working on. Are there things to do in it? If so, what are the things that you need to do in this game? Jump? Shoot? Interact with objects on the map? Now, pretend that you do not have the option of using an input bar or stat panel. How would you accomplish the task of allowing the user to do all of these necessary things easily?
You should already know the answer. It's button presses or mouse clicks. There are basically no commercial PC games that rely on the input bar or verb list constructs other than a very small section of simulation or text games, or games from the late 80s. The reason for this is pretty simple. We have more intuitive and straightforward methods of interacting with our world, and they don't require typing the name of a command we want to execute.
Most BYOND games you see have about 50 verbs and 10 stat panels to house them. Why is this? Well, the answer is that it's the quickest way to interface with the world without having to put a lot of effort into design. All you do is define a verb with a name and an action, and let the user click them or type them as they see fit. Easy, right?
Look at your 50 verbs and determine whether or not you actually need them. Do you need a "create guild" command? How about an NPC you can talk to with dialogue options to create a guild? Do you need an OOC command? Why not just let them hit enter to start chatting, and let them hit tab or something to change channels. Do you really need that verb to stop you from getting stuck in places? How about just fixing those scenarios where they get stuck?
If your game has a list of verbs as its main way of interacting with the world, the answer to "is this game polished?" is most likely "no."
I come from the land of early Nintendo consoles, where you could build a quite immersive and captivating game with a directional pad and four buttons. If you can't write the logic in the game to work on this simple of an input controller, the game is likely to be less fun than a game who can work on that small amount of input. In other words, if your input and visual feedback interface is so complicated that it requires explanation and the player's eyes to leave the game screen, then its a bad interface.
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Well personally I think most of this occurs because it's the first way coders learn to implement commands so most of their projects are based on it and there's really not a lot of tutorials on how to do them in any other ways. I remember when I first started DM it took me a very long time before I even realized it was possible to use macro's to trigger commands instead. In fact the main resource for implementing macros is the skin guide which isn't out in the open. Who searches for skins when they want to know about macros anyway? If you've worked with skins before then it makes sense but macros being a part of the skin file isn't intuitive at first so it doesn't surprise me when people continue aimlessly using stat panels over and over again.