I think (most) everyone pays attention to value even when they're on vacation. Even the people in this thread who say they can afford the onsite prices don't like the price increases because it makes the onsite food seem to be not worth what you're paying. No one likes that. I think
@Sirwalterraleigh even categorized this as a separate negative [edit: to WDW attendance] category, there were the category 2 people who were priced out of their affordability and there were the category 3 people who could afford the prices but who felt taken advantage of and so who were going to go less or stop. And no one is looking down on anyone here. Even the small subset of people hoping for lowered crowds are really just looking for a silver lining in this dark cloud of price increases. And the only sin of the one person who mentioned the possible silver lining of "maybe this means there will be less rude drunk people?" is that they jump to the conclusion that rude drunk people might have less money than the polite considerate people. (Looking at my relatives they might be right)
Anyway, I didn't want you to feel targeted by your fellow forum members.
One last thing on the subject: I remember reading the book
The Millionaire Next Door many years ago. There are some flaws to the study presented in it, but the concepts and ideas certainly resonated with me. The take-home was that most "rich people" (as represented by the titular "millionaire") aren't the idle rich who are wealthy by birth. Neither are the bulk of them fat-cat corporate executives or hedge fund managers. Instead, the majority were small-business owners who drove a older model used car and were very careful with their money - rich through hard work and savings. Now this doesn't capture the "one percent", but it does capture a lot of the upper middle class people that I know - shop owners, skilled tradesmen, engineers, and technologists. One thing I learned in life is that you only need to be poor once in order to understand the value of a dollar.
Now onto my favorite subject, the brown bag lunch at WDW.
Even when we were brown-bagging it 10-15 years ago, I did the math and figured out there was no limit to how fancy your brown bag lunch could be. It would always be a better value than the QS lunches. You could bring fois gras, brie, and bread made from imported french flour and still save money. You could certainly have jamon Iberico and real Swiss emmentaler and still save money (though it might be a crime if you made a sandwich and put mustard on it). But back to reality, I could have an unlimited brown bag budget at Publix and still save money compared to eating in the parks. Unfortunately as I said in an earlier post, this led to the orgy of impulse purchases and good intentions during our grocery run at the beginning of every trip.
The other thing we do some of is park-hop, which enabled us to eat outside the parks while we are hopping. But I agree with you, mostly what we did was hold our noses (at the malodorous prices) and ate in the park when necessary. By the end of the trip I'd gotten quite good at living in a state of price denial where I just wouldn't look at the prices and we would just order what we wanted, billing everything to the room.
