My best judgment about today's E ticket categorization, extrapolating from what's widely agreed to an E ticket, is that it's a combination of:
- Scale
- (High-Quality) Detail
The attractions that pretty much everyone agrees to be an E ticket have both of those: Haunted Mansion, Splash Mountain, Big Thunder, Tower of Terror, Expedition Everest, etc.
Attractions seem to be viewed as D tickets when they lack one of those two, for instance:
- Mine Train and Na'vi River Journey are beautifully detailed, but too small/short to be considered E tickets.
- "it's a small world" is actually a massive-scale attraction, but the sets are too simple to make it an E ticket (despite it being rightly beloved, of course, and indeed being one of my own favorite attractions).
Of course, caveats include:
- When something was vastly larger scale than most attractions at the time it was built (factor 1), that might outweigh its relative lack of high-quality detail (factor 2), which would be why "it's a small world" and Jungle Cruise used to be viewed as E tickets.
- A unique/novel characteristic might for a time push something to E ticket status whose lack of scale and/or high-quality detail would otherwise relegate it to below E ticket status, e.g., Soarin' (which, as flying theaters become more common, may eventually be relegated to D ticket status).
- Attractions with a high level of thrill and/or iconic placement might be viewed as having E ticket status, at least for a time, despite lacking in some of these other factors.
In all, I'd suggest that the E ticket concept remains useful, so long as it's understand as a
family resemblance category that allows for disagreement about the categorization of some attractions.
With all that being said, I hope Encanto contains
both the level of scale
and the level of high-quality detail that I'd suggest would make it an E ticket for all...