Some people don't mind paying a bit more to avoid free dining crowds too. Free dining makes it almost impossible to get a dining reservation. Our resort of choice isn't available for free dining this year.....over the past 7-8 years we've always been able to get it during the FDing promotion
Disney did send us a PIN code this year though.....our first one ever!!! So we priced out paying for our own dining plan, and going later in the fall and it came out to be only 400.00 more.....so we booked it. Free dining would have been cheaper, but really not by that much with our 30% PIN.
It's all about the numbers. A free dining discount saves us about $1,500.00 off rack rates and a room discount at a value resort with 2 rooms, where we mostly stay, is going to save us about $700.00 (and that's assuming you can get the 40% off code for values, everthing in the recent past for the values has been 25% off room discounts or less, so that would only save us about $250.00 vs. a $700.00 FD discount). I know that our family is going to eat more than $700.00 (let alone $250.00) worth of food during a 8 or 9 night stay. We don't split meals and we like dessert. It's a no brainer for us.I definitely do not favor "free" dining. In addition to the reasons stated above, it is quite a different thing to look at the cost of the dining plan compared to what the "retail" cost is of what you can get under the dining plan, versus the cost of the dining plan compared to what we would normally expect to spend on meals.
Yes, if we all get an appetizer and dessert with every single meal, then maybe you can say you are saving something, but who does that?