Other than your anecdotal experiences during the park's opening week, what exactly makes you think that the Shanghai University of Fonance and Economics report is inaccurate?
It is possible for a theme park with popular lower capacity attractions like SDMT, Soaring, and RR to have very long lines but the park still is fairly empty.
As a for instance, here are the wait times for the most popular attractions at SHDL via the SDR at 7:30 PM Shanghai time on 10/6/16
Soaring: 90min
Roaring Rapids: 75min
Seven Dwarves Mine Train: 75min
Tron: 60min
Pirates 15min
I know exactly what you are saying and figured I'd get some flack for it. I totally agree that SDL, much like DHS, functions based on its capacity. Wait times are really only an indication of how close to capacity the park is getting, or a reflection that capacity has been limited.
SDL has significantly more capacity than DHS. 14 rides to their 5. A daytime parade, some walk throughs that people are queuing up for and waiting upwards of 45-60 minutes. Similar to DHS they run several large shows, which also accounts for the parks overall capacity.
I had a look at wait times yesterday evening (Friday morning in Shanghai) and caught some of the morning crowds of the same day, whose waits were pretty consistent (although a bit higher as obviously people weren't getting ready for the evening show). It's really not the Roaring Rapids, Tron or SDMT that I care about. It's seeing 45 minute waits not inconsistently for attractions like Buzz, PoTC, Pooh, Pan or Voyage through the crystal grotto. When I was following closely in the summer those attractions could be pushing over an hour.
Someone can guess towards theoretical total ride capacity for the entire park per hour, but it just does not add up that headliners have multi hour waits, smaller attractions (some with large capacities) are also holding people in queues and the predictions are significantly lower than what Disney 'claims' DHS sees. From a park which likely currently runs half the capacity of SDL.
This is an average too, meaning some days have to be even lower. It is practically impossible for only 15k people to be in that park and post the wait times they are. Is no one in the walkways, is no one at a single show or watching a parade? If attendance is dipping that low it is the sub-headliners that should be a walk on with maybe the Aberent long wait in a low capacity Eticket. I've fallen off watching wait times this Fall, but I've yet to see a single day where wait times (and thereby total park capacity) wasn't at least mildly stressed.
That's why I'm calling bull on the numbers. Even if they are starting to approach 20k now in this off-season, that still doesn't 'average' the year out to 20k. Even with a lower capacity park like SDL, 20k is a very low figure that the park should not be struggling this much to handle.
