Oh man... I've been lurking for a long while on these forums, but I just can't read anymore of this before I have my say here.
PagingTomMorrow, I assume you've heard of equal opportunity. I readily understand everything you've said, but I think you truly don't have any respect for customer loyalty and premium revenue. Let me say that I fully believe in equal opportunity- it's what provides for the raw potential of great things in life.
However, I do not and will not ever believe equal outcome.
You see, a reasonable tiered FastPass system at Disney Parks and Resorts is absolutely a great idea. It provides better value for customers who pay more money for premium experiences. Disney is a corporation built on the premise of making money for their stockholders: and making their higher end customers happy helps contribute to the bottom line. Lower end customers (on Value budgets, in this case) are just as important, but they still aren't necessarily contributing as much to the bottom line. For a tiered FastPass system to be completely fair (and it can be fair, regardless of what you think), it needs to be fully reasonable. This means that unlimited passes for Deluxe resort guests are out of the question, but where it comes to Value resort guests having two passes at one time, and deluxe guests having five, this is more in line with reason and the dollar amount payed. Keep in mind that there are capacity controls on FastPasses anyway, so standby line times will not see any difference either way.
Let's take for example two hypothetical boxes of cookies (I wont even dare come close to your comparison of Slavery and FastPasses... that was extremely inappropriate, emotionally insensitive and frankly appalling ), both economic brand (Safeway Select) and deluxe name brand (Dove Chocolate). Both boxes of cookies have the same amount of cookies (roughly), but one obviously costs quite a bit more. The Safeway Select cookies taste alright, but have less sugar and therefore have a less rich taste. Meanwhile, the Dove Cookies are laced in sugar, and are lick smacking delicious with a great rich taste.
Customer A purchases Safeway Select and Customer B purchases Dove. They are both satisfied with their purchases. How could this be though, with us thinking that Customer B had a much sweeter tasting experience?
It's because of price paid. Customer A knows that Customer B will have better cookies, but he will end up paying much less. This is not an unreasonable assertion, and is one that is not unreasonable to compare to price paid to stay a Disney resort. The value customer understands economics for the most part, and goes into the parks knowing that they will not have all the same features as someone paying five times the amount they will. This means they may need to wait a little longer to enter premium (E-Ticket) attractions, but they are still satisfied with the fact that they can still reasonably correlate the price they paid and that of another customer who stayed at a deluxe resort for the experiences they all collectively had.
They both had equal opportunity here. They had the option of choosing their accommodations (and associated features with such), whereby the value customer could save up their pennies until the day they could afford a stay at deluxe resort. However, this value customer sees frequent visits over premium visits to be a greater value, and chooses to take the value resort path. There is nothing wrong with this, and they will get their FastPasses (two simultaneously) while the deluxe resort guest gets theirs (five simultaneously). The outcome is not equal, but this doesn't make it unfair in any one way shape or form.
I think that it's much easier to look narrowly at the issue than considering everything and looking at the much larger picture. Sure, there are a good number of logistic type rules that would likely be implemented (one fast pass per named E-Ticket, per three hours, for example), but if we're only looking at FastPass numbers, we're not going to learn everything we could. This is vital.
I don't think you have a high understanding of economics, but this is how things work in reality. The more you pay, the better you can expect your experiences to be in the long run.
