I just got finished booking our grand gathering. We've got 17 people (our family, sister's fam, bro's fam, plus granny & pops). I took a poll among them all and we wound up choosing two grand gathering events - the fireworks cruise and the safari. We decided to do the dining plan so the safari is 2TS on that. In addition to that, we're going to all eat at Chef Mickey's, Ohana, and Biergarten all together. The rest of the time we're planning to pretty much do our own thing.
I've never done any of the gg events before, so I can't be of any help on how they are, but I can tell you about booking them. They allowed me to book everything, including the experiences, at 180 days from our first night. I knew we'd be able to do that with the meals, but I wasn't sure about the gg experiences - I had heard tales of people having to call at 7am 180 from the exact day. We had some problems with getting the safari put on the dining plan because some folks in the party didn't have the dp booked yet, so we had to make a couple extra calls to get that all set up prior to booking the safari. The easiest ones to book were the folks who had packages - they just added it to the package with no problem at all. The Grand Gatherings people I talked to were all very helpful and knowledgeable, and they told me we'll get a printout of our itinerary upon arrival. (A little late for me and other compulsive planners I'm sure, but still a nice service, and will be great for those who don't plan ahead much).
Anyway, my take on it is that since those GG events are only available to larger parties, why not take advantage of them when you have the opportunity?
Have a great time planning!
ETA:
After posting this I saw that you're dvc, so I wanted to add that if you decide to go with a gg, request a gg number from member services a few days prior to booking your events and meals. MS will get you a number, then you can call the grand gatherings folks through central reservations to do all your bookings. We had a bit of a mix-up because some folks were booked through dvc and some through central reservations, so we wound up with two gg numbers and that had to be fixed; supervisors from both dvc and gg were on the phone to each other getting things straightened out while i was on hold. They were so nice, but it did take awhile. So go through dvc first, then gg if you can help it! Yours should be a much smoother process if you're all staying in the same place and one person's doing all the booking.
