Character development is often something we 'older/advanced/mature/whatever' roleplayers try to address in our rules and forms. For example, 'At least a paragraph for personality, not just a list of traits please!'. The same goes for looks and history - we, at least I do, often ask for a long and detailed history. It's all to get a better idea of the character, and not just so we understand the character. It's so they can too. I've seen so many roleplay where someone's posted their character's personality as 'quiet, shy, not much of a fighter', which isn't really much to go on. Then, around two pages in, said character is killing people using only their thumb and yelling sarcastic one liners in their prey's face as they die.
Also posts - I know this has been mentioned a lot before, whether in this topic or elsewhere, is post quality. For example, someone may post a beautifully worded, long post with perfect grammar and sentence structure - it IS possible - and then someone replies with this:
mary: *giggles* oh sue you tlk too much like but your such a laff!!!!
And the whole topic explodes and posts are put on like 'Please try and use proper grammer/spelling/more words/whatever.' 'Can we just ignore that post?' 'well im sorry but im new to dis i never wanted to join nyway
'. If it doesn't happen in the topic, it happens in the chat. My point is, if we seperate these two groups - the 'advanced' people and the ones who 'are new' and prefer script format etc - then this wouldn't happen. I'm not sure how we'd enforce the advanced things - we might not even need to. Some of us who have been roleplaying longer may not need those guidelines - we just do it anyway and have our characters all plotted out already, characters we've developed over the years.