As others have said, it's a sports team thing. For many of us Disney was our favourite team when growing up, and when people would say 'why would you want to go to that fake plastic cr*p' we'd say it was so much more than that, a vacation destination like no other, meticulously maintained with a level of creativity unlike anything else, and we'd passionately defend it.
But then Disney themselves stopped caring. Prices went through the roof, permanent giant hats and wands went up to kill theming, attractions (and a whole night district) closed and were replaced with inferior cheap copies, or worse nothing at all, and anything new doesn't demonstrate half the intelligence, creativity and imagination that WDI used to bring to projects in the 70s and 80s. We want our team to be winning again, instead of being a loser, so forums like this let those fans share their feelings and create a community.
Disneyland was in a rut around the turn of the century, a pale shadow of its self, but a couple of internet message boards held them to account, picked apart things that were going wrong and started a campaign to change the leadership. "Why do you post so much about Disneyland if you hate it so much?" was a common refrain.
And yet it worked. Pressler eventually left, things turned around, and now Disneyland is as good as it's ever been. The fan pressure was a definite influence on what happened in California, and a sign that sometimes it is worth not giving Disney a free pass, just because they did things well a couple of decades ago.
So why do we post every day if we hate Disney so much? Because Disney was so influential, so powerful in our lives, and we *want* it to be as amazing once more, there's always the hope that you'll tune in to see a Disneyland type transformation occurring.
If you have a kid that goes off the rails and becomes a drug addict, joins a gang, ends up in jail... do you abandon them, or do you still love them but hope they change their ways? We still love WDW, even if it's not living up to its potential right now.
It's also wrong to say we don't like anything Disney does - there are positive aspects - lots of people like Trader Sam's, the hat destruction got unanimous praise, Rivers of Light looks promising and the quick service food options, while getting more expensive, are undoubtedly getting better.
But when compared to what it used to be like in the 90s, when compared to what Universal is like now, it's hard not to see more negative than positive, especially when the underlying reasons for those negatives, and the assumptions and attitudes that caused them, don't seem to be going anywhere.
We still believe it's possible for our team to win the championship, which is why we can't just walk away, and we come back here every day hoping against hope that this time we'll see signs of that happening once more.
