I could swear I've read blogs or something from those who have wait times posted on sites (like the one a DISer made that had actual and posted waits before Disney closed that option, like easyedw), that said that it is hard to trust the posted waits at RD - especially at the *really* popular attractions (and I would put TT in.that category for epcot) - because Disney doesn't send the red cards through fast enough to keep up with the RD influx of people. That it takes a while for the red card system to cacth up to the actual line.
I know when we first entered the a&e SB line right after RD, it was posted at 45 mins. We entered the line, willing to wait that. We were there for about 10 mins, had only moved like 5 ft, if that, and it was at 90 mins. We knew from our experience with Rapunzel in 2013 that where we were in line was going to be way more than a 45 min wait at the rate we were moving, so we decided to keep our afternoon fp+ for it (it was a 4:25 or so fp+, we did RD because we really wanted to.leave for epcot earlier to get to the last night of f&w since we didn't explore that during the run after party due to the rain). I don't even want to know what our wait time would have been...it was definitely going to be more than 45 mins that was posted when we got into it though.
This is absolutely true and always has been, and I pretty much said that in my post. Note the third sentence in the passage you quoted. Nobody ever said that the posted wait times are surgically precise.
I will say, though, that our experience has been that the posted wait times at the rides are more often significantly LONGER than the actual waits in those first few minutes. We almost always get to TSMM with the posted wait time of 20 minutes and are on an off the ride in 10. Or, on our trip in November, after the ride was down right at rope drop, we returned after riding TOT and RNRC and faced a posted wait time of 40 minutes. We got in line because we knew it wasn't going to get shorter, and were on within 20 minutes. Maybe that has changed, or maybe we have just been lucky, but we haven't experienced it yet. That is why I am asking, in what I thought was a polite, objective way, if this is now the norm or an exception. I'm not inclined, though, to take one example and accept it as the new normal, especially when it isn't consistent with my own experience.
Character greetings to me are a different animal because it is that much harder to predict how long each group is going to take with a character. Some people walk up, say a word or two to the character, get a picture taken, and move on. Others launch into conversations, then have pictures taken with every possible combination and permutation of the people in their group (both with their cameras and the Photopass photographer's), and then have all the kids' autograph books signed before moving along.
Rides have a much more consistent and predictable cycle. FP (either paper or FP+) complicates things for the standby wait because they never know for sure how many people holding FPs are going to arrive in the next 10, 20, or 30 minutes. But, our experience has been that they tend to err on the side of having the posted wait be longer than the actual wait. Again, maybe that has changed and we are just lucky enough not to have experienced it yet.
