POL has affected many people here as well. To some it was a great aid to help learn to program complex systems in a multi-threaded environment, to others a deciding stone in their career ( I am not kidding ). I know college professors who taught their students programing using pol. POL is more just an emulator, its a great tool with unique set of features. Its UO server, its a web server and its an AUX sever which makes possible to develop a 3rd party service. Feels like a whole operating system.

As for RUNUO simplicity its a Myth! Its easy to setup a shard using RUNUO, but when it takes on actual scripting its C# we a talking about.
While EScript is a simple script engine easy enough to grasp for about just anyone, using C# would require an extensive programming background.