I appreciate all the perspectives many of you bring, and I love both DSNY and Mickey Views. I personally think NOS is the best land Disney’s ever built (Cars Land is a very close 2nd, and haven’t been to Pandora yet).
Respectfully, I think we’re looking at this from the wrong perspective. Many of us keep trying to guess what the plans are going to be, asking ourselves “Is it thematically congruent?” Sadly I don’t think that’s going to win the day when Disney decided whether to keep an attraction. The better questions, if you want to discern the current trajectory of WDI, are, “Is this current thing problematic?” and “How can we better utilize underrepresented IP and/or marginalized groups currently without representation?”
Pecos Bills? Problematic. The concept of a “Frontier” and its attendant historical issues? Problematic. Tom Sawyer and the works of Mark Twain? Problematic (despite their consideration as among the greatest American novels of all time).
A switch to a vague “Southwestern Land” that erases these concepts while bringing characters from PATF, Coco, and Encancto to the fore is a triple play: it 1) undoes problematic antecedents, 2) brings more robust IP into the parks, and 3) adds diverse representation. To understand the reasoning behind the reimagining of this entire swath of the park look no further than what’s being done to Splash.