I wonder whether DDP might have something to do with this. Now that virtually every resort guest needs to use a sit-down dinner "entitlement" every night, I can imagine that they are looking for ways to push the DDP people into eating at various RESORTS. I would bet we will see more character experiences at the resort restaurants, in order to encourage people to go there.
We were there three weeks ago, and in order to use all our DDP dinner entitlements at different places we traveled to resorts that we WEREN'T staying at for dinner several times(Whispering Canyon, Hoop-De-Doo, and O'hana). We also ate at the Cape May Cafe (we were staying at Beach Club). They were all excellent, and we'll visit them all again, but they did pull us away from the parks for several hours each time. These were all essentially Magic Kingdom resorts, so fortunately transportation was not a big issue. But getting from one resort to another using Disney transportation is not always a simple matter.
In fact, we used more than half of our dinner entitlements at "out-of-park" dining options. (We also dined at Akershus (breakfast), the Crystal Palace (breakfast) and the Liberty Tree, among others).
I'm sure Disney would love to encourage this type of "resort dining" behavior, to decrease pressure on the park dinner service, to increase bookings at the resorts, and to make it easier to make dinner reservations within the parks, or maybe even possible to walk in and get a table after a reasonable wait (since, presumably, if there are more character opportunities outside the parks, many families with young children will choose these options).
The DDP also caused us to visit Epcot several times more than we might have, due to the variety of sit-down dinner options there. I wonder how resort guest manage to use their dinner "entitlements" if they don't have Park Hoppers without going to Epcot virtually every day?
Before DDP, we would enjoy several sit down dinner experiences, but not necessarily one every night. Now that everyone has to try and eat a sit-down meal every night, I expect to continue to see changes in some of the better restaurants. We' already seen a lot of changes due in my opinion to DDP.
