Don't forget that at BWV (and BCV and VWL), some interior space from the rooms was sacrificed to provide the interior hallways for the resort itself. These also need to be air conditioned, heated and cleaned.
Prior to the design/construction of the resorts that followed OKW, extensive interviews were conducted to find how members were using the villas.
One point made evident was that most did not feel the need for some of the space in the living room/dining room/kitchen area. While that has been described as cutting back "because in 'member surveys' they found that people didn't use their kitchen and didn't need the space", the real assessment was that less space could still work for the majority of guests and probably had nothign to do with the actual size of the kitchen.
If you really evaluate the size of the "kitchen" itself, there is little difference in the space at any DVC 1BR or larger villa. The main difference is in the living room/dining area at OKW. There is room for the full coach, love seat and chair plus the larger table and storage counter behind.
I suspect if someone were to measure the hallway space outside their villa at BWV, they would "find" most of the square footage difference in the OKW rooms. BWV Studios might even be proportionally larger.
HH has a similar situation- no interior hallways (except for the few rooms in the lodge) and the livingroom/dining room/kitchen is still a little smaller than at OKW with the same basic layout. There is no love seat in the living room there either.
There are no buildings at OKW further than a few hundred feet from a pool. Most are no further than the distance from a room to the pool at any of the other DVC resorts.
Some guests don't like public transportation regardless how it's presented and will avoid using buses at any resort. (I enjoy the buses at OKW and ALWAYS use them- even when I have a car- that's just my preference). We walk to DD and back every morning when at OKW. If I'm at BWV or BCV, I do enjoy being able to walk to 2 parks- but find the walk to MGM (over a mile) to be a little unpleasant in temperatures above 90º with high humidity and thunderstorms. The boat is just another form of public transportation and is no better/worse than the buses in my experience. We'll use the boat if it's too warm/humid/rainy to enjoy a walk. Some will probably never walk to either MGM or EPCOT, for physical or personal reasons- even though they are staying one of the nearby resorts.
Having stayed at every DVC Resort, it's pretty easy to find far more positives about each one than negatives. I can easily recommend every one to anyone who asks me and can create a list of resaons why they'll enjoy any specific resort. In my experience, the differences in the resorts are far smaller than the impression often given on this forum. It's great to have such passionate enthusiasm about something but wonder how much better might it be if we could express that enthusiasm without denigrating the experiences of others?
...what's a "transformer" anyway???
