I was in the same boat you are in a year ago! I was wanting to book a room at the DLH for January and couldn't. It is very frustrating. DVC members also cannot book reservations at any of the DLR hotels using points for the upcoming year before August in spite of the fact we have an 11 month booking window for DLR hotels. As I recall, once they release the 2009 rates, ALL of 2009 will be available to book. I think its a safe bet that rates won't go up too much, given the current economy.
Just keep an eye on things so you can get a good rate when they do come out. My experience has been the rates keep getting higher as they sell more rooms. At WDW you have separate seasons where you know pretty specifically what maximum rates you'll be paying. Rack rate is generally the highest you'll pay. At DL, there doesn't seem to be a rack rate, they seem to start out at one thing and as they sell more rooms (i.e. the demand goes up) they start hiking up the rates. They don't have codes or much in the way of discounts. Even AP rates at the DLR hotels are hard to come by and hard to figure out.
I might add that I have run into this for several years and nobody has been able to give me a concrete reason why! When we bought DVC and started using points for DL I thought that would help me to preplan a bit more but no dice. I complained to DVC and got the "that's the way they do it and they always have". Not much of an answer.
