Like many others on this forum, I had believed that Guardians of the Galaxy: Mission Breakout was a decision from the Bob's. That was until Behind the Attraction aired today and shed new light onto the situation.
In it, it stated that around June 2016, Imagineers were tasked with getting a new attraction up and running by Memorial Day 2017, no specifics on what it needed to be or what it was themed on. As it was a short deadline and due to lack of space(explained in Imagineering Story), they did not have the time to build up a new attraction, so they looked at changing up an existing attraction. They brought in Joe Rhode to help them choose what ride, and his eyes set on the Tower of Terror as he didn't view it in his eyes as a hotel and instead just a structure that can be modified to look as something else besides a hotel. It was settled, the Tower of Terror would be rethemed, but they had no clue on what to retheme it to and have it be an easy job. Coincidentally, GotG Volume 2 was being worked on at the time and the Imagineers liked the first movie, so they decided to theme it on that IP. Again due to time constraints, they could not really modify the ride system either, so they only had time to reskin and reprogram the ride.
What this says is that it was never Bob Iger's and Chapek's decision to specifically target Tower of Terror in DCA for a Guardians of the Galaxy retheme, but rather the Imagineers decision(specifically Rhode) due to time constraints. Tower of Terror in DCA was getting a retheme even before Guardians was considered, and if they had more time, they would of made it even more drastically different than what it is currently, or even avoided the casualty of the ToT completely and chose something different. This also puts to rest the rumor of Tower of Terror getting rethemed due to the cost of the CBS license.
I highly recommend watching the episode as it goes much more deeper than what I explained here.
