Okay, but seriously, it comes down to what you're trying to do to these systems and which behaviors you're trying to encourage or discourage along with a certain amount of simulationism to draw players into the headspace of their characters.1. It's annoying
2. I don't like it.
In survival games in particular the emphasis on several resources to manage while struggling as the landscape tries to murder you helps draw the player into tense desperation as they work constantly against an uphill battle.
The endless struggle for survival becomes tedious when you have to constantly cram food down your mouth or go out into the wilds unless food and drink were made very scarce - which would in turn make it painfully difficult for a player to go through a newbie area or just storytell, because then you would have to balance travel and gathering against folks sitting down and casually RPing for four hours.
Energy is explicitly the barrier and solution to this issue, as it adds a clear survival mechanic while also being a relatively safe buffer that does no drain down when performing safer tasks.
This is a MUD, an RPG, and with a certain amount of storytelling leveraged together, so the circumstances seem a little different.
In terms of pacing it seems like what is going for is a certain amount of realism behaviors - e.g., your character should stay clean, eat, drink, and so on - coupled with the pacing of you go out and grind then come back and sit around a campfire or inn to have conversation.
EXP bucket covers this, energy bar covers this as well. In particular, the energy bar coupled with regulated traffic (main roads, inns), is clearly supposed to create short breathers where people come together and chat and network a little even if they are not sitting down for long sessions.
Which mean there's a lot of overlap in what these systems do in gameflow:
Energy bar: Combat balance mechanic, resource management, time sink for advancement.
EXP bucket: Time sink for advancement.
Food/Drink: Money sink, resource management, encourages trading with players
Time delay: Combat balance mechanic, gives mobs time to react you, fundamentally broken, time sink for advancement
Morale: Does everything the previous items do, except for giving mobs time to react you
There's a couple problems here.
The energy bar is interconnected to so many systems that it requires constant maintenance and balance to stay functional, increasing future and current workloads.
The EXP bucket and an energy bar do precisely the same things. The only difference is that the exp bucket has a lower maintenance requirement while also being extended to compensate for the length of scenes and being more flexible. If you make the energy bar too large, it will no longer serve it's purpose - whereas the opposite is by and large true of the bucket. Similarly, the energy bucket is a lot more forceful (for better or for worse).
They also drag out content by slowing players down.
And most importantly they're PUNISHMENT mechanics, which is mechanics that feel like players are being slapped on the wrist or chained down by. Regardless of their effectiveness, it's added pressure on players and their tracking for both.
I posit that just replacing all of it with the morale system, balancing the game around always having positive morale (10 or something) and having players default to zero.
While, mechanically, it should have roughly the same effects in long and short term gameflow, the presentation and how players view it is key as instead of 'you get worse if you do this' is 'you can only get STRONGER if you do this'. It's roughly the same thing way back when some MMORPGs realized that they had degraded exp after a certain amount of playing: They simply reversed it, saying that the 'degraded' exp was the new normal and that you instead got a daily boost (thus, day-lies).
Similarly, morale is a simpler system to keep track of as a resource, and it's relatively easy to understand. There's also a certain amount of flexibility in special rooms that help boost morale, sitting around, swapping stories and drinking fine liquor before foraying out into battle again. And as a storyteller, even if some people 'exploit' the system to just afk or idle in these rooms, I certainly appreciate the very concept that folks have arrived just to listen to me blather
Food and drink? Perhaps it's limited in how much you can consume - perhaps you have to sit down to eat, have utensils for certain fine dishes, and they boost your morale substantially. Doing things can slowly drain your morale, just like it does an energy bar. Sit in a room doing nothing but manufacturing tiny statues all day? Morale goes down. That's not good for your mental health!
The key difference is broad application and that you are not *unable* to do things at low morale; it would be possible to simply make it cost-inefficient to do so, and balance the game around having high morale.
EXP buckets may be kept due to simply wanting to have a longer-tempo resource drain for long scenes, but it would necessitate that buckets be both larger and drain more slowly.
And as for the argument of wanting to create a survival scene, that would only be possible in a zone far away from a town, and it's just as easy to fill it with hostile mobs that grind down your gear and try to kill you while being substantially less effort.
How broken roundtime is will be covered somewhere else
tl;dr
Rip out most of the mechanics and use the morale system instead to decrease staff overhead and as a reward mechanic instead of a punishment mechanic to decrease player stress.