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I'm a little late to the party, but I couldn't disagree more with Grimfinger's premise.
My first experience with PBM was with computer moderated games, and at least for me, I continued to be attracted to computer moderated games for a number of reasons: consistency of quality and longevity (I knew that the game wouldn't suffer or disappear if the person running the game had a personal or professional crisis) and impartiality (despite our best efforts, humans are rarely capable of complete impartiality) foremost among them.
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In my PBM days, I played mostly computer-moderated stuff.
One of the hand-moderated games was called Silverdawn or something like that. The writing of the GMs was pretty good, and they responded well enough to my narrative turns, but I still felt like it was a flat one-on-one experience. There was very minimal interaction between players -- mostly it was a game between player and GM. The other was "computer assisted", but I didn't stay in it long enough to have my special actions come into bloom. I will say that the GM in that game spent a fair amount of time telling me about the errors on my turn form, but failed to see my (clear) intent and correct it for me.
Most of the computer-moderated stuff felt a little flat as well. I played It's A Crime, Monster Island, and a couple of others for a little while, but they seemed like an awful lot of money for what I was getting. I mean, you sent in a turn, someone sent back a print-out -- why should that cost $3+? There was some player interaction there, which helped.
The best experiences I had lay on both extremes. Empyrean Challenge was the ultimate close-ended computer-moderated space empire game. The design forced people together (sharing a home planet) so there was intense player contact from the start. We had newsletters, alliances, etc. Great fun. There were so many errors/bugs on the part of the player, the data-input team, and the software -- you could almost call it a computer-assisted game.
And on the hand-moderated side was the home-made games my brother and I ran. Role-playing, with intensely long and lovingly crafted narrative turns, lots of team-building among the players, etc. It was an enormous amount of work, though, and eventually we got girlfriends. ;-)
I am probably still on the side of computer-moderated gaming, if only because it can be (and should be) free. I still plan to build a PBweb game. One of my most important goals is to make it a more compelling experience than the proto-PBM stuff you see on facebook (mafia wars, et al). But if there were a compelling human-moderated game out there with vigorous player interaction, I could probably be convinced to pay for it.
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Sorry, Grim, but I have to disagree with your basic premise, too. Now Rimworlds was never just hand moderated, but we encouraged special actions had a pretty descent ability to make changes to status based on orders given in special actions, and would offer up detailed responses that weren't just boiler-plate. In addition we strongly encouraged role-playing and human interaction - but understood that much of that would come not because of, or with, dah ref, but without his help or knowledge. Had we not had our computer providing the cake, we could never have spent the time and effort providing the icing of interaction both with the GM and with other players.
I also argue that PBM isn't dead unless you insist on getting your turns delivered by the increasingly unreliable snail mail. PBM is an attitude towards gaming by both players and GMs that can be (and is) provided by both PBeM and PBWeb.
