Yeah... something told me the power users were still going to need to be up at 7am... The good news for me is this really solidified the fact that it's not work the extra money each night to stay on property... I can get Tiana's, Remy, and even SDD just fine as long as I know these times.
My in the park experience was that these drops times were only partially accurate. Accurate might not be the correct word.
1. In a few cases, I was able to book at a drop time.
2. In other cases, I saw what I'll call phantom availability. In those cases, a time popped up on the first or 2nd screen, but I was unable to book it, even with repeated refreshing.
3. Refreshing to get a better time was sometimes useful. It was more useful in the afternoon/evening. In the morning, I was rarely able to move up any of my prebooked passes.
This is where it gets a bit tricky. In the early days of G+, there was no modify. (only cancel/rebook, which sometimes worked for me.) In the later days of G+ (and last year of FP+), I had good results with refreshing.
It was odd to me, that in Epcot especially, many rides were walk-on. My LL passes were a total waste of money, and even though most rides had short waits all morning, we were unable move them, and had little ability to book more.
YMMV.
This visit we more keenly saw the contrast between how easily we toured Universal and how annoying it was to tour WDW. In Universal, we had EP. EP did make waits shorter, but even without it, touring would have been less stressful than touring WDW, esp HS.
In HS, if you don't buy LL, you are looking at miserable wait times. It isn't just how long the waits are, but how slowly the standby lines move. Getting in the front gate was also slow.
Another big plus of Universal, IMO, is how well the boats work. At park close, the boats docks look very crowded, and it looks like it will be a long wait for a boat, but the boats come frequently enough that we never had a long wait. The boat staff were also all very nice.
I also got a sense this time that the WDW security staff aimed to search a higher % of parkgoers. A woman in front of me, was sent to the extended-search and wanded, even though the only bag she had was a flat passport carrier, smaller than most wallets, and she didn't have any metal when they wanded her. At least one of us was often scanned when we entered a park, though it changed who was scanned. So person A was fine entering 1st park, but then scanned when we hopped. Person B was scanned entering 1st park but not the 2nd park.
. We don’t know why or how they decide to do the random checks but if they were increased it’s possible they had some viable info about a potential threat. There was a security incident in the evening at MK the day we left (last Thurs), but as far as I know it didn’t involve weapons or anything, just some fools fighting over getting on the monorail.