I’ve ridden IJ when it was in much worse shape than dinosaur during the closing week.
This 100%
Might as well throw in my two cents since we're back to glazing Indy again.
Having ridden both attractions multiple times, every time I've been on Indy its been riddled with broken effects, broken animatronics, completely unintelligible dialogue, speakers so loud they break your eardrums, and constant breakdowns. Dinosaur was always in much, much better condition than Indy from my experience. Perhaps I've been extremely unlucky, but considering Indy keeps getting major refurbs all the time to fix these issues, perhaps its not luck. To my knowledge, Dinosaur never got nearly as many refurbs as Indy did .
Yes, Indy does have more detailed sets and they're well-built, but Dinosaur always had a stronger storyline to it. Dinosaur had clear canonical purpose to every guest interaction with the attraction, preshow, queue, even the individual ride vehicle movements. On the flipside, Indy's main storyline is simplified and not as well structured, like making the main plot point trying to find him inside the temple, which you accomplish literally 20-25 seconds into the ride. The queue is, though very-well decorated, really only that elaborate out of pure necessity due to the building's location relative to the entrance making it extremely long. The queue would be insufferable without all the decor.
The biggest weakness with Dinosaur though was relying too much on special effects to communicate the story. Effects *always* get turned off for xyz reasons, which in this case rendered the ride experience to bouncing around a dark show-building with some dinosaurs. I think this is why people praise Indy more. Even if the effects are gone there is at least something to still look at. If Dinosaur didn't rely so much on those special effects, it would have been a much stronger attraction consistently IMHO. That said, even though Dinosaur was for the most part a bare show building, nobody ever mentions how the back half of Indy is nearly just as bare as Dinosaur (the shooting dart room, the dark rooms right after the bridge, etc).
Don't get me wrong. Indy is a very well done attraction and would be awesome if everything actually worked as intended, but to say Dinosaur was terrible in comparison is simply a bad take.
So, TLDR, Dinosaur was a much stronger attraction than Indy and much better than most people thought it was in my humble opinion.
