Thanks for the correction. I have no problem believing that J.H. is a little bit out of touch and/or out of date. I don't really blame him. It's hard to set yourself up as rumor monger and then expect that your friends from the old days will still want to feed you the hottest and freshest news.
I wonder if one of the reasons why the story is particularly muddled in the case of DHS is that the layout and infrastructure of the park was done in such a hasty and ill-conceived way that it's hard to re-imagine it or add anything significant to it without shutting it down and rebuilding from scratch. Or shutting down at least half of the park, and then shoe-horning new stuff in and around the elements which you just can't afford to shut down. Which is what seems to be happening now.
The story was supposedly that a Disney exec was shown the plans for Universal Studios Florida, then broke their non-disclosure agreement by going to Disney and convincing them to build a quick and dirty copycat park.
I think that current park layout looks suspiciously like what someone would come up with who had seen the plans for USF, couldn't remember the exact dimensions or details, but made a quick sketch for the imagineers to use. The imagineers then flipped the sketch left-to-right in order to have some (implausible) deniability of the violated NDI.
Now they're stuck with a water feature that's too small and un-aesthetic to keep but is too much "in the way" to easily work around or replace, a hub that's not really a hub with a weenie that's not really a weenie, dead end roads leading to the most popular attractions, and a completely illogical and un-modular layout with not only buildings and water features in the wrong places, but wiring and plumbing too.
Sucks to be them, but I can't help thinking, this is karma for the original dirty deed that led to the conception of the park ... allegedly.
