There's a lot I'd like to say about the sickening amount of schadenfreude going on here, but it'd probably earn me a lifetime ban.
Suffice it to say that I do not understand the tendency of so many people on Disney boards to root for everything the company does to fail in the vain hope that it'll result in the parks and films magically reverting to how they looked in whatever year the poster's formative memories were made.
I'm very squarely the target market for this. We're late GenX, I actually met my wife at a weekend-long LARP, and we're longtime Star Wars fans. We're not super-hardcore SW fans (I have friends with an encyclopedic knowledge of all things EU and current canon who can tell you the exact measurements and crew complement of an Imperial Star Destroyer, and that's just not where we're at), but we're definitely fans. Our tween daughter is obsessed with Clone Wars and Rebels, and has cosplayed as Ahsoka Tano complete with makeup and the Galaxy's Edge legacy lightsabers (she has also cosplayed as Rey). She's been begging us to do the Starcruiser ever since she first heard the words "Star Wars LARP", and has a character background already written up. The only reason we hadn't done it yet is because we'd committed about $40K and a whole lot of PTO to vacations we'd already booked for 2022 and 2023. We planned to go in January 2024, and are now scrambling to see if we can make it work in July of this year instead (we're not in the 1%; our budget may be larger than many Disney guests but it's not infinite).
For many of our friends with similar backgrounds, though, the price was absolutely a dealbreaker. Our general consensus was that they overpriced the experience by about $1000 for a family of 4. At $1000/person, most of them would have been calling to book trips the instant they opened reservations. I don't know whether it would have been feasible to operate the Starcruiser at that price, but I'm pretty sure they could have filled all the rooms.
The biggest issue other than price was probably replayability. There are multiple paths through the weekend, but the overall plot never changes. I think that if the Starcruiser had been more successful, they would have changed out plotlines eventually. It would have been even cooler if guest activity had an actual impact on the ending, though (i.e. if enough guests went with the First Order path, the Resistance doesn't win in the end). We do have one friend who did it twice, and he was blown away the first time, but the second trip had a lot fewer guests onboard and he felt like the plotline was broken (not enough people for certain activities to have succeeded but the plot kept going as if they had) as a result in a way that might have been avoidable if there was at least wiggle room for adapting to circumstances. And no, he's not a blogger who got paid to praise his first trip. There are a lot of "real people" who paid for it themselves and loved every minute. It seems like you get out of it what you put in.
I have actually received multiple marketing fliers about the Galactic Starcruiser over the last couple of years in both snail mail and e-mail from Disney World, DVC, D23, and Disney Visa, just to comment real quick on that point.
As for timelines, we couldn't care less whether it was set in the OT, prequels, sequels, New Republic era, or even 20,000 years earlier. You're not there to roleplay a heroic X-Wing fighter pilot and hobnob with Princess Leia. You're there to roleplay being a vacationer in the Star Wars universe, and that's actually far more interesting and believable to us anyway. But then, most event LARPers are used to the big influential names and truly powerful characters being NPCs while we play characters at more reasonable levels. There's no reason for any of the well-known characters to show up on the Starcruiser at all, really (even Chewie is an awfully big stretch), and they suck all the air out of the room when they make an appearance. Suddenly, your story isn't about you anymore, you're just a hapless set decoration. If Vader shows up on your ship, every living thing on it dies. Luke, Han, and Leia are busy leading the rebellion or fighting the Empire and hardly have time to care about one random cruise ship. Same with the Sequels. Maybe some 2nd-tier Jedi from the prequels might have shown up in the Prequel timeframe, but certainly not anyone on the Council. So mostly it's just what lapels are on the villain's uniform and which version of Stormtrooper armor his troops are wearing.
Truth is, if they'd built Galaxy's Edge and the Galactic Starcruiser just a couple of years later, they very likely would have set them in the New Republic era (Mandalorian and its spinoffs). That probably would have been a happy medium that pleased fans of all three eras. Even if they'd gone OT, though, Vader could never have been the villain of either the land or the ship, for the simple reason that (as I said above) he never wastes time on trivial things like scaring townspeople into compliance. If he's there, it's because someone has ****ed him or the Emperor off enough that a Dark Lord of the Sith has to show up and demand answers. Kylo Ren, a random Moff, or some warlord from the Imperial remnant, would be much more likely to stand around making ridiculous speeches.
I think I had some other points to make, but I started rambling and now I've forgotten them all...
