That right there shows you how bad it was. So many brides hated that awful castle and so they helped do something about it.
Some other ... surprises waited for us at that hotel. The pool and a good 75% of the parking lot were completely inaccessible as they were undergoing some extensive renovations. The windows for all of our rooms were covered in plastic, protecting them from said renos, making the views quite ... surprising. I'll have to pick at that scab and ask my mom if she was snowed with the above-mentioned technicality, though I have a feeling poor planning may be the responsible party. We certainly didn't get any VHS from Disney!
I was 10 at the time and was a huge fan of it.
The important thing though is not that you didn't know it was that Anniversary, it was that one thing didn't live up to what you expected. That happens almost every time I've been there. Different things, of course. For example, I brought a friend there that I knew would love the Haunted Mansion and built it up all the way there. The days we were there it was closed (rehab). It was very disappointing but it happens. The important part of your story is that you went again and have seen it. To me the shear creativity of it, the idea of how much it must have cost to design and build for just a short time made me grateful for being able to see it in its whimsical greatness.
Disney has shown time and time again they cannot handle doing something like this at that scale. I would like to refer you to the wand and the big "Epcot" over top of Spaceship Earth, the stitch toilet paper castle, and that gaudy monstrosity of a hat that they slapped down in front of the Chinese theater. But the worst offense that I can remember has to be that castle cake. If they want to do something to celebrate an anniversary then I'm all for it but when people go to one of these iconic parks they want to see the castle and all of the big icons in all of their glory. They don't want to go after saving up every nickel and dime they can get and then be stuck with pictures of an icon in the background with garbage all over it. I would say having a big badge slapped onto the front of the castle is bad enough but at least people can deal with that well.
Those two things were the equivalent of emptying the trash when compared to the Castle Cake. That took a lot of engineering and attention to detail to pull of and they pulled if off perfectly for those of us that were not upset about a plastic cake over the top of a plastic castle. People should be able to deal with anything that is located in a place called Fantasyland. Want to know what is the opposite of that is the closing of Disneyland's Haunted Mansion every year for 5 months to overlay HM with that cartoon catastrophe known as Tim Burton's The Nightmare Before Christmas. And for all those haters of IP's it makes them giggle with delight. Now that is a reason to be concerned about a mutilation of an attraction.
