The OP's list of how Disney customers should treat CMs is excellent. It applies well to all customer service employees.
It's unfortunate, however, that the OP ignores Disney Parks management's notoriously poor treatment of CMs as a major cause of morale problems and job dissatisfaction. Upper management's refusal to support their frontline CMs in disputes with abusive customers has been well documented for the last decade. Management's attitude that CMs are disposable and interchangeable is ingrained in Parks management culture: it shows in the cutting of perks and the slashing of hours, in the pathetically useless customer service training that the Company gives its employees, and in the poor quality of on-site employee services on both coasts.
There's no question that the abusive behavior of customers is getting enormously worse. There's also no question that Disney Parks management does essentially nothing to help its frontline employees deal with it. CMs are left hanging in the open, to defend themselves as best they can -- often at the risk of their jobs. Management continually demonstrates that they will take an abusive customer's word over a CM's, even when the CM is defended by a lead. The result is the crushing of CM morale, an increase in turnover, and the well documented decline in Disney's formerly high standards of customer service at both WDW and DLR.
At Disney the customers are bad. The bosses are worse. The CMs are caught in the middle. It's a reality that makes the simplistic "it's only a bad-customer problem" spin of the OP so specious.
