Inaccurate statements aren't helpful to anyone. But that wasn't the point.
Consider that "I paid $50 for a steak dinner" would be a fact and "I did/didn't like my steak dinner" an emotional opinion.
People who like or don't like something often volunteer or are asked to articulate why. Their articulations may not be exactly correct or accurate because they are simply but always an attempt by the individual to explain why they feel that way.
Those who counter such viewpoints, whether "like" or "dislike", focus on pointing out how the reasons for the emotion are false or inaccurate or not representative of others - yet that does nothing to impact the emotion itself.
In other words, the reason this continues to be an often discussed topic on the DIS for several YEARS now is because both those who like it and those who don't struggle to articulate the emotion itself. And that was my point - it's difficult for any company to capitalize on the good or improve the bad when the root cause is an emotion. In the case of WDW, their own continued efforts to survey guests in and out of the parks on the same aspects of a program who's fundamental elements haven't changed in over a year indicate to me that they are still trying to translate the emotional aspects of why someone would like or dislike the current arrangement into tangibles.
So the fact remains there is apparently enough of a divide on the matter that Disney themselves continues to spend enormous resources to determine why - something I don't believe they would continue to do if just a handful of people on an internet forum didn't "like" their program. And if Disney hasn't been able to figure it out yet, there's not much hope any of us here have either.
Lake, I understood the point you were making the first time. I would understand if these were regular people airing their frustrations on a message board, but they're not.
The Disunplugged podcast was my first WDW informative outlet I used, I trusted them to provide factual information. Now, after this particular podcast I'm starting to question that trust. At the beginning of the podcast Dustin stated this episode was to be a refresher course on all things My Magic+, but yet they got some basic information wrong and were misleading on others. Here is a list of the comments I took issue with:
4:34 Kevin: The idea that you have to pick a or you can pick a time months in advance to go see the haunted mansion.
13:15 Rino: You go through and you look and there are no fast passes available, and what's kind of terrible is that if I did book it three months ago...
13:42 Kevin: Don't you think it's forcing people to become dependent on their phones. (This was partially rebutted)
15:15 Kevin: (Referring to magicbands) But there's a difference, you bought a ticket and now you have to buy something to use your ticket. (This was rebutted)
17:02 Kevin: That is only for a short time. Like if you buy the Darth Vader one it doesn't do that all the time. Those are limited time events.
25:35 Kathy: I think back to how it was on vacation with my kids, and I would ask them "what's the one attraction that you want to ride?", and then we would make sure that we did those. Well now if you only have three, I mean it was easy for me, I only had three kids, so I would get those three. But what if you have 4 or 5 or 6 people in your family that want to ride different things in the park. Now, how do you say to little Johnny "hey, we're going to do space mountain instead of carousel of progress?".
26:43 Kevin: It's great that it works for you, that you can plan your trip six months out.
28:30 John: Like Pirates. There would be waits but it would never really seem like you waited for pirates, it was a fast moving ride. Now there's hours and hours in a standby line.
29:04 Rino: I'm not 100% sure that you can book all three fastpasses for 3 major rides though.
Craig: You can't.
Rino: You get like one big, one medium, and the smaller one.
29:20 Kathy: The other day I was at Figment and the line was almost out the door.... now there's a long line because you need a fast pass for it! (Figment had a 5 minute posted wait as I wrote this)
30:13 Kathy: Even the joke used to be or the story with spaceship earth. You don't want to ride spaceship earth first thing in the morning because everybody would hit it. But now, there isn't a downtime for spaceship earth. (SSE had a 5 minute posted wait as I wrote this)
35:52 Kathy: We talked about memory maker in there. You have to have a magicband to use memory maker. So if you're offsite and you want memory maker you still have to have a magicband that's the only way you can get it.
38:28 Corey: I'm gonna choose big thunder mountain, we can all do that. I'm gonna choose Peter pans flight. I'm choosing two tier A because we like both of those.
Again, I really wish Pete had been on this particular episode because he wouldn't have allowed these exaggerations to go unchecked.
