I'm another Texan agreeing with the posters talking about our local public schools going after people who take their kids out of school without a doctor's note. A friend of mine's straight A student daughter was almost kicked out of school because she had to go to her father's wedding (out of the country.) She was legally required to attend, due to the conditions of the custody agreement, but the school did not care and gave her zeros for all days missed. She was not allowed to make up her work (nor allowed to take it with her, although she asked in advance.) Another friend was told she was going to be reported to CPS because she took her kindergartner out for a week to go to WDW. Seriously, it can be a real nightmare. Texas public schools around here get some of their funding based on attendance, so they are unbelievably intolerant. (This is part of why we send our kids to private school!)
As far as the new route goes, I love it and think it looks great. We're already booked for a November cruise, but we're not booking another until we've seen how we like cruising with Disney.
We love cruising out of Galveston and do so often. We are probably who Disney was hoping to target when they tried out this market. We'd never tried DCL, but we're frequent cruisers who pull our kids out of school to take vacations, we love Disney, and we have the funds to indulge our whims. What they miscalculated on initially is that we've done a route similar to their initial planned route many times. We're tired of Cozumel. We're almost as tired of Grand Cayman. Admittedly, we haven't been to Costa Maya, but only because we had to cancel the cruise we'd booked to it for various reasons. (The only way the route could have been less interesting to us is if it had been Jamaica instead of Costa Maya.) I like the new route. It is different, and if it had been available when we booked, we'd have booked it. We were curious enough to try DCL that we booked even the initially offered route, and were disappointed that we wouldn't get to see
Castaway Cay. This is an improvement, in our minds.
Now, I admit, if I'd booked a route and they switched me to a cruise of a different length, I'd have been pretty unhappy. And if they'd switched me to 2 back to back 4 night cruises going only to Cozumel, I'd have been absolutely livid.