I think your appraisal of the complexity of writing an MMO, and your somewhat naive idea of how they work, is an inaccurate representation of facts. No doing "portalized data comms" [sic] isn't particularly difficult. For an MMO though, it's also insufficient.
Given i've worked on a hugely successful system that draws some parallels to MMO's and has a player base of 30k, given that i'm a network programming specialist, given that my post was hardly in depth, given that I have a commercial MMO game on my day job development schedule starting mid-next year - I think it's a little unfair to label me naive my friend, based upon 1 paragraph :)
I did mention already B3D would not be my tool of choice for an MMO, although i'd be perfectly happy to use BMax. B3D can do it if you're happy with the graphics.
Multi-core isn't necessary at all, although BMax does support it. Clients dont need to run all the players in the game and servers are typically more hampered by bandwidth than CPU.
For instance, in my coming project I intend to build a cluster of servers, theoretically I could build numerous clusters, each cluster driving 'unlimited' data-zones in terms of CPU handling, the limit is the network capacity on the rack. They speak to a SQL staging server, which in turn goes off to a server farm for the database that the DB gurus deal with (not my forte). Despite all this CPU power, the bottleneck is the switch on each cluster.
So please, a little more credit. I don't say much around here, and sure I do ask stupid newbie questions often i'm scatty and forget the basics of Blitz, my day job doesnt involve Blitz. I program in Blitz for myself when I get the chance and I forget and I dont keep my ear close to the ground.
When I do say something though, and when i'm not taking the mick, I generally know what i'm talking about :P