So far as calling a clearing a "room", that's simply how text MUDs work. The world is comprised of zones, which are comprised of rooms. The name 'room' is something internal; players shouldn't be exposed to the term at all. So far as how AweMUD presents it, I doubt you'll find a text MUD that does much better. UI is one of the absolute worst things about today's text MUDs, something I abhor about the MUD scene in general, and something I'm trying very hard to Do Right(tm) in AweMUD.
The bits you see now for character creation and combat are all rather "number heavy," which I'd like to fix. For example, with comobat, textual descriptions of your results would be highly prefered over numbers. Again, tho, there aren't any real rules or anything for how combat works, since I haven't devoted any time to coming up with a skill/ability/combat/magic/etc system. Yet. I need that before I can devote much time to polishing the player-visible aspects.
If you've any suggestions for how to improve the AweMUD interface, please feel free to let me know. (And no, I'm not going to do a roguelike interface. ~,^ )
I should also note that the screenshots are fairly out of date...