In theory there is crowd control, but our October experience was that in practice not so much. It caused crowd issues, not crowd control. The park reservations and restriction on hopping kept the crowds from evening out. Everything was packed with huge lines at DL by 10:00 a.m., and it was beyond frustrating to look at the lines at CA and see they were all really low and be unable to hop over. We were trapped. Everyone was trapped, so there was no way to balance the crowd. Both parks were sold out--- but the ride lines were vastly different between the parks and no way to even it out. I think the issue you have with restricting hopping until 1:00 p.m. is that unlike WDW, at DLR there is a large number of locals that don't show up until noon or later. So, all you are doing is restricting for a time period when hopping would allow the crowd to balance out if one park is more crowded than the other. After 1:00 p.m. people can go in any park. You can scan in to your reserved park, walk immediately out, and cross to the other park. The reservation system serves no real purpose at DLR- or at least the restriction on hopping doesn't.
Also, the downside we saw is EVERY SINGLE MORNING of our trip outside the gates we saw at least one crying young child with a parent explaining they were sorry but even though they had tickets they couldn't go to
Disneyland like they promised them because they didn't have a park reservation. One morning we saw about 5 separate families with crying kids on the plaza that could not enter the parks. It is heartbreaking to see, and I'm sure even more heartbreaking for the family. At least in October, there were clearly a lot of people out there that did not understand the park reservation system or that a ticket did not gain entry into the parks. We were just passing quickly through the plaza to the gate too, so I can't imagine how many there must be like that every day if we saw that many in a very short time.
