I was planning on getting to MK an hour early for rope drop but i’m now thinking the hour is after parking? Should I plan on being to the parking lot 1.5 hours prior to RD?
In my experience going from parking tollbooths to tapstiles is closer to 45-50 minutes.
This includes parking, getting out of your car, walking to the tram, riding the tram, getting off the tram, going through security, missing the boat (not an optional step, you will miss the boat), deciding to take the monorail, realizing that monorail is not running, backtracking and taking the boat instead, getting hit in the shin by a scooter, cursing, almost missing the boat again but getting on this time, getting off the boat, and walking to the tapstiles.
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Poor Pete. You have experienced some bad luck!
Your first mistake was trying to get on the boat rather than the monorail. I mean, it is WDW. You’re SUPPOSED to take the monorail. And when you find out it isn’t running, you try to get on the resort monorail instead, only to have to backtrack and THEN miss the boat. 
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Yikes! I don’t remember it taking this long. Hmm, 
(stretches budget to cover Minnie Vans)
There, that should work.
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So do I want to aim for driving into park around 1.5 prior to rope drop or try to push for 2 hours? 2 hours seems a bit extreme and I’m thinking it’s already going to be hard to get the family to leave for the 1.5 hour arrival. But we don’t have a FP for 7Dwarfs so doing what I can to rope drop it.
We completely lucked out that it was a bit rainy the morning of our MK day and ended up being a CL2. We only took 30 minutes from parking to park entrance, but we were so close that the trams hadn’t started running yet and we didn’t have to wait for the monorail either. I don’t expect that to happen often though.
Do you drive to work? If you do then you know that getting out the door 5 minutes late can be the difference between no traffic and a ton of traffic. The same principle applies to WDW. Sure, 2 hours is guaranteed to be overkill but 1.5 hours might get you there only 45 minutes or less before RD. Or even worse, behind seven Brazilian bus tours (I’m exaggerating).
Here is a video that shows the difference between being in front of the pack and being at the back of the pack.
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I’ve never had to take a parking tram if arriving prior to rope drop!
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