1. Disney could never truly gouge people. People would just stop coming. This isn't like gas prices where all of the gas companies collude to screw you over when you need to go to work tomorrow. People NEED gas. No one NEEDS Disney.
2. Extracting every dollar from your customer is fine as long as your customers remain happy. Disney is finding the balance: Lower crowds, still happy customers, keeping a large customer base, and equal or greater revenue. If that cuts you out, I'm sorry. But in this instance it's important for Disney to cut out a "considerable segment"... the parks are getting too crowded (especially
Disneyland) and you may not fit.
Honestly, Disney probably uses a well known economic algorithm to determine pricing of everything they do. They plug in customer counts, demands, income levels, economic stability, crowd levels, spending habits, etc etc and out pops a number. MyMagic+ probably makes this very easy for them to do. There's no guy behind the curtain that says "hahaha... let's screw some people over today". There's just a computer that says "your probability for the best outcome is to do XYZ" and then they do it and then they win.
I'm sorry if my post came off as a lecture. I didn't intend for it to be that way. Sometimes people get upset and it clouds the ability to rationalize why something is the way it is, so I just wanted to break it down.