Care to provide an example of all these budget cuts? Everyone likes to throw out the "DISNEY IZ CUTTTING ALL UR BUDGETZ!!!1!" line but I'd love to see an example of a project that we know to have been approved at X dollars and was cut down to Y dollars for no reason other than "TDO is cheap." Note: It doesn't count as a budget cut if it's the result of WDI overspending on a different project and it needed to be covered or if 9/11 happens and the economy hits the crapper.
Well, when you ask for that narrow of an example, LOL - as we don't generally get dollars amounts at both levels (usually we hear about them after the cut) I don't think anyone without true insider financial information can provide what you are asking for. I think it happens early on, before we'd get wind of actual numbers (and I don't doubt that it happens).
That said, "value engineering" is quite apparent. I'm sure it happens at all kinds of levels, and you are likely correct if I get the gist of what you are saying, which is budgets are not disappearing until they get into the black hole of WDI. There is some bloat somewhere in their operation that sucks money and doesn't spit out the equivalent product. I mean, that's why EE is such an embarrassment - it was only 1/2 done to begin with, and when the Yeti doesn't even work...it's even less. There is no way the product they end up with has actual costs anywhere near as high as the price tags.
This isn't unique to WDW, you find it all across construction projects anywhere now (they cost much much more than inflation or increases in material costs would account for, and efficiency has dropped considerably) but what is a bit baffling is that normally it's exasperated by too many different hands out through the process, but at Disney it's all within the same company yet happens to an even larger degree.
I also think priorities play a lot into it...instead of the best guest experience, I don't think that is WDI's calling card these days. I mean, imagine how much of the budget of 7DMT was spent on the "sway" feature. Many many millions in developing it, I am sure. Now, in the end, it's a clever little trick, but I think the average guest would have been much much more impressed if instead of focusing on that ultimately little thing, they just hadn't bothered and instead added another 2-3 show scenes instead.
Similar to Everest, again - if Rhode hadn't spent millions and millions gallivanting around the world gathering junk for the queue and concentrating so hard on something most guests aren't really going to know is fake or "authentic" - particularly given Disney has done everything possible to make it even more attractive to just sit on your smart phone in queues instead of "absorbing" it - we might not have ended up with a completely empty mountain that they have to hide the interior with tarps like some low-rent amusement park.
WDI aren't the altruistic heroes that many make them out to be - I do think the money men take the lion's share of the blame but they aren't the ones deciding
how the money is spent, that's mostly at the WDI level.
