No, that's just not how this works. Park hours are driven by expected crowds---Disney doesn't extend the operating day to be nice, they extend the operating day because they have to to handle the number of people they think are coming.
Attendance was already down about 1% from the most recently completed quarter, and that was before the worst of the economic news really sunk in. Advance bookings for the quarter starting in January were down 10% before the promotion was announced, which is a really big number.
And, it's important to remember the real job of a promotion: it's not necessarily to get more people in total to come to orlando. It's also to get people to book a more expensive room than they might otherwise have booked, or to book onsite if they might normally have stayed off. A travel agent friend of mine told me that of the bookings she did in the first week or so of the 7-for-4 promotion, almost all were guests with established bookings upgrading their resort. Only a few were new bookings. Only one just took the discount on what they had already booked.
To me, the President's Week hours tell the story convincingly. Those are the shortest they have ever been since I've been coming in February in 2005. You have to go back to 2003 (which was still seeing effects of the post-9/11 travel crash) to find a time when MK had shorter hours that week, and even that's arguable.
I so hope you are right and I am wrong!
We'll at least you're still hopeful, too.

just wish they would confirm one way or another!!!!
I sure hope this doesn't mean I have been calling all this time for nothing!!


