If you want to go for total abstraction, then there would be no way to describe the experience and no reason to try. Abstraction is incompatible with theme park design though because in theme parks, every design element is selected to tell a story. Every aesthetic choice leverages our psychology, biology, society, and other fiction in order to create mood and understanding. Entertainment design communicates messages. Abstraction doesn't. Abstraction is the absence of meaning. If the scale of the collectors fortress is enough, so be it. Do we need to accept that the gantry lift is part of the tour? Or is there an alternative way of getting us onto the attraction in a gantry lift in the collectors fortress?
Also in response to phruby's comment that Disney can't win, whether or not they have a backstory. Backstory doesn't equal immersion. Many of the best immersive experiences are just that, experiences. HM, POTC, Space Mountain. Fully immersive, no backstory. Backstory can try to mimic film and gaming to create worldbuilding, but if something can't be buried properly in the world, the backstory has to be dumped on people, and that breaks immersion. If the rumors of boarding the escape ship from Batuu and getting intercepted by a star destroyer in the queue are true for battle escape, and we move from on planet through a ship, out of a ship facade and into the star destroyer hangar bay before boarding a ride vehicle, that would be INCREDIBLE immersion, worldbuilding, and backstory told through environments. Everybody will understand that and there won't be any videos telling us what is going on. The plot too and all that it leverages are things we understand, and it isn't asking us to redefine them. We are on a planet, safe, until an enemy force arrives, and we have to escape danger. We leave, get abducted/detained, and must escape to freedom. Theme parks and fiction more generally are a way to draw meaning from life. Even alien IPs are really just projections of human mythology and anxieties onto aliens, which is why star wars is basically about 20th century geopolitics and warfare. Nowhere are they expected to say "oh and this ship that you must escape from is actually a fast food restaurant in outer space, and your ship won't land in a hangar with other ships, it'll land in a restaurant bathroom. And you won't escape by getting off this ship, you'll escape by performing magic that is fluff not native to the IP or to this world. That is the difference between good and bad entertainment design!
And another way of thinking about the preshow in guardians: It feels to me like the word preshow carries a lot of collective memories. We know what a few of them are like, and how they prototypically work in themed attractions, how they've been done in the past. So it looks to me like there were preshow rooms leading to the ride, and they did what they could with that framework and the IP. If the IP was the only framework, I doubt it would have produced the sequence of rooms we pass through or the stop-to-watch-a-preshow video format. Just because something is extraterrestrial and different rules might apply on a different planet altogether doesn't mean that we can just excuse a bunch of bad design. That's just an excuse. Taken to its logical conclusion, another planet wouldn't have walking, talking creatures, televisions, rooms, any of this.
This coming from somebody looking forward to marvel at dca, and sw:ge. But I dont have to be fully against every single aspect of every Disney decision or blindly supporting it either to the extent that I can't think critically and would rather mock people who I don't agree with! Saying this in an effort to say that my end game isn't to defend some position to the death, but rather to have a discussion, and that the backstory somebody laid out for Guardians a few pages ago really gave me a ton of thoughts that I chose to share.
