I find the new ride system way too restrictive and time consuming to do. If you get the ride times you want you are probably jumping all over the park and backtracking. I feel forced to buy genie plus and LL or have a miserable time at the parks. It's just not for me anymore. I'm old enough to know E coupon tickets in its day and all the others. I'm not liking the new way at all; so, we have found other vacations to do now.
The newest iteration of DAS is less time-consuming and should lead to less traipsing around, so long as you are organized about it… just prioritize getting return times for the attractions near where you are (or where you want to be). There really shouldn’t be any need to run around all over a park.
It’s
much better than the early DAS days of getting return times at DL many years ago. In those days, you had to go to a kiosk in one of a couple locations (like today‘s blue umbrellas). There were 3, I think, at DL and 2 @ DCA, iirc. To get a return time, you had to leave the area you were in and hand carry a little card to one of the kiosks— and wait in line. The kiosks served as general info desks too, so there were always quite a few guests and typically only 2 CMs. At the hub kiosk, CMs looked at the wait times board there, and based a return time off of that. The posted times were rarely accurate, because they were only updated every hour (ideally, but in practice it was less often than that). I can’t remember how the other kiosks, came up with a return time, but I think they called the hub on a walkie-talkie. I just remember that often we’d go over to the ride, and find our wait would’ve been less* if we could do the standby lane… but not being able to do stairs made it impossible to just get in line. A couple times, I pled my case to a lead at the ride, and sometimes they’d take pity on the disabled mom there with her disabled kids, and revise our return time to somewhere close to the standby time… more often, they’d just shrug and tell us to go back to the kiosk & they’d call over and tell them the correct wait time. The couple times we did that, no one ever called them, and the lead was never available when the plaid CM would try to reach them. We learned quickly, that it wasn’t worth bothering with, if CM at the attraction wouldn’t fix it. [* I‘m talking about getting to JC and seeing a standby time of 30-45 mins instead of 90 that we were told, or something like that... not just a 10 or 20 min. difference]
Eventually they came up with these little handheld scanners that they would scan your ticket right at the attractions, and on the screen of the scanner, the current wait time would be displayed. The CM would do the math, and write a return time down (still on a paper card). It wasn’t perfect… but nothing in life is… and it was mostly accurate. And since the return time was given by the CMs there at the ride, they almost always made adjustments on the spot. But the best part of it was it was no longer necessary to slog to a kiosk before every ride. And at DL there are almost no accessible queues, so basically you had to go and get a return time for nearly everything.
So, the DAS the way it is now is just so much better. I think it allows for better control over the timing of rides and I know I am enjoying the feeling of autonomy at deciding which ride or attraction to experience next, without needing to traipse across the park or talk to a CM at every ride.
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Ok, on re-reading your post, I realize you might have been talking about
Genie+. If that’s what you meant by ‘ride system’ then I agree, it definitely seems like it
could make for a lot of back and forth across the park.
We aren’t even gonna bother with G+ when we go in Oct. because we’re staying off-site so we’d be at a disadvantage anyway, and besides that, I have enough to worry about first thing in the morning… The
only ride I’m going to worry about before we even get to the park is GotG virtual queue. Past that, we’ll be there for 7 days and I think that will be sufficient time to see and do everything we want to do with DAS.
I’m just hoping my typically very adventurous, and extremely gregarious & extroverted dgd, will turn out to love roller coasters as much as the rest of the family does. She is already more than tall enough to go on everything, so as long as she’s game, we’re gonna let her be a daredevil.
Btw, I also remember the coupon books. My sister still has some partly used ones— with A & B tickets left mostly of course... but she actually does have a booklet with one or more E ticket(s) in it, because her kids were so little at the time of that trip, they didn’t hardly do any rides that needed the E’s. And then of course by the next time the went, Disney had switched to the “passport” system, so they never ended up using the leftovers.
We also didn't get into the parks usually until early/mid afternoon and liked the sightseeing and shopping. I know this is not everyone's style of doing Disney, but it suits us well and ends up (I think) being a pretty relaxing vacation. By the way, I'm in my 40s, husband is in his 50s and we have no children -- if that helps to understand how we do it! Anyway, we didn't even feel very affected by the crowds with my DAS. It was a nice way to go. 
