Here is my perspective as someone who used to go to WDW every couple years as a kid (late 80s - early 2000s) and recently went back for the first time in almost 20 years with my own family.

Some of the new scheduling processes made life easier, but by and large it was much less pleasant compared to my childhood visits. Back then, the parks were way less crowded and open later at night. We could easily go on the most popular rides without much wait time if we got there early or stayed late. It was never a problem to make reservations at any of the restaurants just a day or two in advance. We could choose which park(s) we went to on a given day based on what we felt like doing that day. The extent of our advance planning was my parents making airline & resort reservations and us kids going through that year’s Birnbaum guide with a highlighter.

Going back this year was jarring. I knew we had to make park reservations ahead of time, so I made my best guess as to which park we’d be in the mood for on which day. I had no idea that we would need to make restaurant reservations months in advance. I had no idea that we would need to spend an extra $15-$20 per person per day if we wanted anything resembling reasonable wait times for rides, plus ANOTHER $15/person if we wanted reasonable wait times for the most popular rides.

That degree of scheduling added so much stress to a family vacation. My kids ended up wanting to spend more time at AK and HS than I’d expected, but we couldn’t adjust our park reservations at that point. Some days we weren’t hungry at whatever time we had a dining reservation, but canceling it meant (1) we wouldn’t be able to eat at that restaurant at all during our trip, and (2) we’d have to try to find another dining option that didn’t involve a 2 hour wait at whatever point we did get hungry. We spent $60 on ILL for a ride that we didn’t go on because both kids were melting down by that point in the evening. I had absolutely no desire to be up until midnight to buy Genie+, then up again by 7am to buy ILL and make Genie+ reservations, but there I was.

FWIW, we stayed at a deluxe resort during an “off” time. We loved how seamless the park-resort experience was, and overall we had a great trip. But in general we prefer family trips that are more laid back, and plans that won’t be derailed by kids being kids.

That’s a great story - it made me think about how much we relied on radios and landlines for local news back then. I was probably watching that same episode of Alf a few hours earlier on the other side of the country.