A good friend is a member and I am seeking his counsel also. He brought up the member days and said they usually coincide with when we usually go in late August. He also brought up hard ticket discounts too. As others have said, basing a decision to buy direct based on member benefits is not the way to go which I fully agree with. However while they can take benefits away, what if the demand levels out and they decide to bring back more significant perks if sales decline or become stagnant? I know hoping for future benefits is the same as banking on current ones but what the hey...
I think
@ScubaCat 's thought questions are important. FOMO is emotional and not really rational, so trying to reason yourself out of FOMO might not work.
Also - I would not think about renting out points to "break even" or "pay for" your purchase. You're thinking of buying in to DVC because you like vacationing at Disney and you don't want to stay in a value or stay in a moderate when you can get "deluxe" or "deluxe-adjacent" accommodations for roughly the same price. So every time you rent out your points for the $, that is a night or a trip you are not taking to Disney, which is the whole reason why you bought in the first place!
Finally - here's a little reasoning that might help - what are the actual direct member perks that can be assigned a $ value, that we have used in the last 2+ years, over 6 trips and 38 nights? (not all stays on my own points; some on rented points, some at Swan/Dolphin):
2 years of Platinum + APs for the price of gold - x 3 people = 6 passes
technically - it would be ~$300-400 per pass = $1800-$2400 (approx; I am too lazy to look up historical prices)
But we have not been to the water parks, so maybe it's worth less than that because we could have just gotten platinum passes.
3 discounted tickets to
MNSSHP: total savings of about $60 - $90
2 discounted tickets to HS after hours: 2x$30 = $60
We have Tables in Wonderland, so we don't really use the DVC discounts on food (plus since we have APs, we also have the AP discount).
Merchandise discount = let's assume $1000 in purchases (probably way overestimating) = $100 saved at a 10% discount.
total actual savings = $2650, MAX.
Oh, and we've been to the member lounge at Epcot once. Kids had a fruit punch and adults had coffee. Meh.
Our 25 point direct purchase cost about $4600 total. So we haven't recouped the total cost of the 25 direct points yet. But we actually needed the points, so if you only assume the cost is the "upcharge" for buying those points direct, that upcharge would only be close to "breaking" even with a 25 point direct purchase with 2017 prices because of the crazy P+AP for the price of gold deal they had going on.
Each year going forward we will save about $200 per pass. That's a lot of passes.