Here are the changes that we observed. And I am not editorializing here. You can take these changes as good or bad as you see fit. And note that this all pertained to a very busy holiday weekend where park levels were 8-9.
More stress or more relaxed than your previous trips?
More stress. We stayed at the Dolphin and were not permitted to pre-book. So my prediction was that we would have to arrive early at the parks in order to obtain usable FP+ times. And we would have to arrive early to get our FPs before untenable lines built up at the kiosks. We were correct on both counts. FPs for prime attractions were gone by mid-morning, and desireable return times were gone earlier than that. (I am defining a "desireable return time to be one that is not "first thing in the morning" when FPs aren't really needed; not during dinner hours when we have ADRs; and not late at night when FPs aren't needed). And the kiosk lines were a nighmare by 10:00-10:30. So we arrived at Rope Drop to avoid all of that nonesense. But that said, by arriving at Rope Drop, things worked out beautifully. We never waited in a long kiosk line and got 14 out of the 15 FPs that we wanted. Belle was gone even at Rope Drop.
It was also more stressful because we are/were "one in a while" Rope Drop people. Over the course of a 5 day vacation, we migh RD twice. But for the reasons stated above, we RD'ed every day. That was our choice, granted. But 5 straight Rope Drops started to take its toll on family harmony.
Did you spend more time together rather than one person always running off to get the next FP?
I'll never quite understand this. Who did this consistently? In literally hundreds of cumulative days at the various parks, I can recall doing this once in my life, and that was right after Everest opened. My wife like to do the Safari first thing, and I was worried that FP lines for Everest would be like getting one for TSM, so my wife and daughter went straight to the Safari while I ran to Evererst, got our Fast Passes, and then ran to the Safari to meet them at the line entrance. Hot. Sweaty. Out of breath. And I never did it again. I have used hundreds of FPs in my life, and those were the only ones that I ran to get and the only time that I separated from my family except at other "logical times" like when the girls would go to the ladies room and I would say: "I'll hop over to Space Mountain to grab some FPs while you hit the restroom here in Tommorland". I don't consider that "running off to get a FP". Or perhaps I would give my wife my lunch order, and while she was in line at Pecos Bill's, I'd go over to Splash Mountain to get FPs and return to the table after she got our food. Again, I don't consider that "running around to get a FP".
And even if one wants to call it that, we did the same thing essentially when we got our FP+s. We didn't all wait in the kiosk/i-Pad lines. Only I did. So to the extent that there was any "separation" before, it still exited under FP+.
Did you have a massively different trip to your previous ones? Did you see/find/experience things you'd missed before?
The biggest difference that we noted was that bue to tiering at Epcot and DHS, and due to our decision to make RD, we were largely pressed into hitting all the "major" attractions in the first hour and a half of park opening, with limited ability to repeat them later in the day except for what we obtained through FP+. So while previous trips might have seen us scattering headline attractions throughout the days, under FP+ coupled with Rope Drop, our days were more of the "rush around for headliners" in the early morning and then tour more slowly, seeing shows and lesser attractions as the day went on. That is not necessarily a bad thing. But it does make the day a bit of a decrescendo. To be fair, that was typically the way we would do Epcot, with the biggies early in the morning and the countries in the early to mid-afternoon. But instead of heading back to Future World later in the day for another round of biggies, we were only allowed to do one. So our trip back to Future World was a bit of a criss-cross with limited pay-off.
Where we really noticed the difference was at DHS. We had pretty much done what we wanted to and were allowed to do by 1:30 and had a difficult time filling the rest of the day wit stuff to do while we waited on our 7:00 dinner reservation. Before, we would have been doing another circuit of headliners in the late afternoon with FPs. This time, we found ourselves spending a lot of time wandering around and visiting One Man's Dream for more time than any human has ever visited before. And that was after seeing several shows that we were only moderately interested in (Indy), just to kill time. This new world order of knocking off headliners early in the day and then roaming around leisurely in the afternoon is going to take a bit of getting used to. My wife liked it for the most part. My daughter started to get bored.
I'm interested to know whether people were surprised at how much or little time that they were in lines.
Huge difference here. In the past, (with the exception of TSM), people didn't usually pull FPs for the 9:00-10:30 time period because you didn't need them then, and it was a bad idea to waste a FP to bypass a relatively small Standby line. But what we noticed is that people were reserving these times with FP+ (either on line because they didn't understand the strategy of getting FPs for later in the day) or because they were "day of" people who had no other choice. But every single day at Rope Drop, we witnessed people rushing through the FP+ return line for their "first ride of the day". And then the people just kept coming. When people discuss on this Board the notion that FPs for certain attractions will book solid, I think they lose sight of the fact that this means that the first two hours of the parks' operation are included in that calculus. That never happened before. Whereas FP people might return in dribs and drabs in the early morning hours, now, with all slots accounted for, people are returning to the FP+ return lines in as steady a stream at 9:30 as they are at 3:30. This means that early morning SB lines are getting cut of with people who have FP+ priority, and that simply didn't happen before. So Rope Drop is more important then ever, and the "RD effect" of smaller lines evaporates far more quickly than ever before. This was the single biggest difference that we noticed. We got into the Test Track line when the time board had just turned over from 20 to 30 minutes, and that was at 9:26 a.m. Our final wait time was 75 minutes and the ride did not break down during that time. The line did not extend out of the building and honestly looked like a 20-25 minute wait visually. But the steady stream of FP returnees turned this into a death march. In the past, the number of FP returnees that would have cut off the line at 9:30 could be counted on one hand. Now, they 9:30 hour is as solidly booked as the 2:30 hour.
Was our trip ruined? Not by a long stretch. But we have had to come to the conclusion that we must tour in one of two ways from now on. We either have to do what we did and Rope Drop every day in order to beat the crowds at attractions that we cannot Fast Pass. or else we will have to stay for many more days and spread our FPs out over time, conceding that we won't do every ride on every day. I have never, ever been to Epcot and not done both Soarin' and Test Track on the same day. Well, now I have and this may become the "new normal". On our last day, my daughter and I did a half day at Epcot while my wife packed. Noting our Test Track dilemma on our previous Epcot day, we decided to do an experiment where we got a FP for Test Track and ignored Soarin' altogether so as not to run into the same problem as before. We simply did not have the luxury of time to deal with a "surprise" 75 minute wait when the board said 20 or 30 minutes. By skipping Soarin' completely, we were able to get quite a bit done both before and after our 10:15 FP for Test Track. But the cost of doing so was skipping my daughter's favorite ride. So in the future, we are likely to tour Epcot in a whole new way, using two full days to see the park, getting a FP for Soarin' one day and Test Track the other, and completely ignoring the ride for which we do not have a FP. This is probably Disney's goal. Keep us on property for more days. And it just might work. The alternative is to do RD after RD, day after day, rushing around for the first 90 minutes like never before. i could do it and so could my daughter. But my wife would kill me.
Edit to add: I would also say that things were different in that for the most part, we waited in FP+ return lines in either make-shift ropes, or randomly outside of actual queue entrances. I hated the feel. I hated the visual. I hated what it did to the beauty of the parks. I hated what it did to traffic patterns. But did it change the way we toured? Not really. But it is a palpable differrence worth noting.
Sorry for the length, but it sounds as if you want a fulsome explanation of what people are witnessing, and those are my observations for what they are worth.
About a week and a half after returning home, I was able to login with my password.
I said yes it was and she said no it is not. 
