Note: we haven't planned literally anything among Staff for new moria yet (besides that it will be with 99.9% probability with a kind of teleport), thus all statements are my opinion.
I think the build quality is crap (no offense to those who built it)
No need to apologise for that statement. Its true and thats well known and overall agreed to, though that still does not blame the builders (beside for the unrealistic things you mentioned) as there were just not the same technical possibilities back then.
I'd like to preserve some of that at least in the revamp of Moria. Maybe just pick the best room (in my opinion, the 21st Hall has the most detail, but could still use far more) and copy that into the new Moria.
The idea is good and worth considering, but I don't think it'll be such an iconic location. I could imagine taking over some smaller rooms and placing them in historically newer areas of Moria and argue that these rooms aren't finished yet and thus don't look that good yet. Like that we keep the old build in memory as a nice side fact on new moria and we still don't have a weirdly intrusive building with unmatching building style (it is to be expected that we will have some new textures for new moria)
And I know I'm gonna get a lot of hate because of this, but I think that this should be mainly a job for the Artists and Designers
There will be much work for every rank. This won't be much different than Osgo where there are many ways to involve, your own quote: "
let's make it an entire city, not just a series of tunnels" A city needs houses and I don't think dwarven houses can't be built in Freebuild style as Osgo and MT. And the tunnels which we'll have plenty off too are just the dwarven kind of road; an artist or designer comes up with some designs and Adventurers can copy that over all Moria.
achieve the most work in the least amount of time
No need in haste. Rather make it last longer but make it so nice that we don't have to redo it two years later again.
First, I rather liked the idea (I don't know who proposed it earlier on this thread) of building it in it's living state and then ruining. This has, in the areas it has been done in, worked extremely well for Osgiliath, and I believe we could achieve the same result on Moria.
Actually something that bugs me on old moria is that it is too ruined in some parts (e.g. Chamber of Light). Moria is abandoned since around 1800 TA, so no maintenance since 1200 years. Guys, stuff does not fall in ruins cause thats an elementary natural rule! Most of the cities that actually are ruined (e.g. Fornost or Tharbad) fell in ruin due to weather, may it be the yearly changing temperatures making materials fragile, snow pressing it down, rain, maybe even wind is a cause. Or in case of Tharbad a river flooding the city. But Moria is undergorund, has rather constant temperature, no rain nor snow. Ofc theres the goblins, but why would those go around an abandoned place just randomly destroying stuff nobody cares about. They'd do some wooden stuff as seen in Goblin Town, but no reason to tediously destroying bare stone builds. There was akind of war between the dwarves and goblins, okay, but you can't really use machinery like Trebuchets as in Osgo. So, Moria won't even have to be ruined too much.
But couldn't we technically (if we're not using it) just load a ton of new terrain on the old map and then use that for Moria? It would fit in there, it wouldn't be on a different world like the nether, and it wouldn't take up random space in the ocean (sorry fin, I like the idea, but for the sake of accuracy, I disagree). We could just keep the old map in use, or at least that section of it, and just tp them back out seamlessly once they're all the way through. They'd never notice the difference, especially if we built a blind of the surrounding terrain.
The reason why I proposed placing it into Belegaer was as it may be difficult making an as seemless as possible teleport thing to another world. Only warp to plotworld once from the main world and then warp around in the same world, you'll see theres a difference. If it technically doesnt matter we would rather place it on an entirely new map or on PlotWorld. No need to mess with the Old Map.
Anyways, sorry for the really long post, just ever since I joined MCME I've always looked forward to that fabled day in the future when we would "someday redo Moria" and it will be even better than it is now. I've been dreaming about this project since the day I first toured through the city. Thanks for reading!
Many people can't wait for Moria 2.0, me neither. Good that you brought it up again, though most of the questions already appeared once before the forum wipe.