Not only is it literally the first thing I would do on a builder, I would be shocked to find it out of bounds. I have built on other muds. To balance a fight, you need to know spell effects, not guess at them and log onto your mortal to do 100 tests and collate data.
It's a silly rule which ignores both the needs of the builder and the reality that I literally learned this game (as did many others) after realizing that some people have illicit information, and while I will never be told said info, I can group, observe, and glean the castoffs of their cheating... as there is no other way to learn the things some people treat as common knowledge.
While I can accept that some people actually spent 800 hours learning Uth or two weeks staring at a bookcase in Righ, (unlikely but possible), the level of detail I have seen commonly distrivuted in groups re spell effects simply isn't achievable via means other than statting. Trust me, I file such knowledge away for the coming years when I see it, hence the savant-like random knowledge with huge gaps... but of course, such basic knowledge should be available to more than those clanned with the lucky few.
A builder *needs* details on any spell which gets used in his zone... that's a minimum need for balancing. However, the intentional obfuscation that this game calls spell help files have been a travesty since before Clinton was elected.