I don’t necessarily disagree with you, but my situation is admittedly different from yours. A few clarifications / rebuttal points:
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In my more detailed remarks after my trip report, I said that I would prefer FPP to return only for headliners (I used a 30-minute cutoff, but 20-25 would work too). I loved Fastpass / MaxPass at Disneyland (where it was only active for headliners). I hated FPP. I mean, it’s great to have a FPP for Test Track and Soarin’! But then you have to get one for Spaceship Earth thanks to the bundling / tiering? We walked onto Spaceship Earth last week. Having FPP available for those kinds of high-capacity, fast-loading rides, as well as less popular rides or shows, just inflates the standby waits and makes the line feel longer because it doesn’t move as fast.
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FPP makes it harder to plan ahead because, for example, on your HS day you had to worry about the tiering system. Sure, you might be able to snag a same-day fastpasses for some attractions, but the only way to guarantee riding all the headliners with no wait was to have multiple days at HS.
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On average, you can probably use one FPP per hour. Your advance FPP of course were coded to be at least an hour apart, and you had to use leading reservations and/or be lucky to get good return times. Same day can be gamed a little, but only after you’ve used your first three, and on busy days you may not be able to get a favorable return time. In other words, you’re going to have to wait in some standby lines or wait around doing something outside the queues. So it helps to have some rides that don’t have FPP (and therefore, no inflated standby wait) so you can hop in line while waiting for your next FPP return time.
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I don’t mind waiting 10-20 minutes for a ride. It helps build anticipation and also many of the queues are designed to introduce the theming. What I didn’t like was waiting in the heat or rain. That’s why my other recommendation was to build more shaded and/or air conditioned queues, especially if they add more theming elements.
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Even with a Fastpass, you often end up waiting 15 minutes or more. The worst offender is Soarin’ - last week we had a Rider Swap return wait that was longer than the initial wait in the standby line (~30 minutes), just due to the way the queuing and loading procedure works there. If having fastpass doesn’t eliminate the wait, or at least get it down to 5-10 minutes, it’s not really helping as much as it appears. (I’ll add that waiting for Soarin’ was one of the most tolerable waits due to it being entirely within an air conditioned building.)
All this said, while I didn’t love waiting in 30-50 minute lines for headliners, it was an acceptable trade-off to not being able to go to WDW, and there are enough cons to the FPP system that for me, with a family who can’t dash from one side of the park to the other or predict exactly where we will be at any given time 60+10 days in advance, the current system was preferable to FPP.