That. Doesn't. Matter.
Everyone deserves a fair chance to get ride, even if they know they might not be able to. If Disney is explicitly telling people the park may open early but that boarding groups won't go online until 8AM, that isn't a fair chance. That is penalizing people who follow Disney's guidance and don't seek out social media for other non-official answers.
But wouldn’t these people already be out of luck if more people than the ride can accommodate had already lined up outside the gates? Let’s say they waited to open the gates and the boarding passes at 8:00 am. If the ride can only handle X amount of people in a day and X amount of people are lined up outside by 7:30 than anyone who shows up after that is basically out of luck - every person in front of them is entering the park before them and will have access to boarding passes before them anyway. I suppose some of the folks who showed up right at 8:00 might have a chance if Disney opened the gates early but not the boarding groups if they showed up at 8, got through the turnstiles quickly and were quicker on the app than some people already inside the park but that seems like it would be a small number of people.
Truthfully I do think they could have rolled this out better (EMH day especially) but I don’t think this is some diabolically unfair scheme by Disney - they are basically limited by the ride’s limited capacity at this point and ultimately whatever queue option they went with was going to end up with potentially 2/3 of the park’s daily guests being disappointed by not being able to ride.
My job sometimes involves distributing tickets for something with very limited space. Our official policy is that tickets are not distributed until 10 minutes before the start of the event however for very popular versions of these events people will show up early. We don’t officially form or manage a line but people often do it on their own. When it reaches the point where the independently formed line exceeds our capacity for the event we give people numbered tickets that are not actually tickets for the event. We tell people they have to remain in line with their numbered placeholder ticket until the official distribution time at ten minutes before the event start time and then we trade the numbered ticket for the actual ticket. So while we have officially honored our “ten minutes before” policy, anyone who arrives after the last numbered ticket is given out is out of luck unless someone abandons the line. We don’t actually want people to form a line at all - the idea is that these events are drop in and not pre-ticketed but we can’t control the behavior of the public in arriving earlier and forming a line without creating an really unpleasant scenario involving security asking people to move along. And even if we did that and then had more people show up 10 minutes before than we had tickets to distribute we would end up with chaos as everyone rushes forward for a ticket at once. This used to happen before we used the numbers and I’d spend the next 30 minutes dealing with people screaming at me about how they were technically here earlier than an another person who managed to push their way to the ticket distribution faster. We still get complaints about the number system being unfair and it sort of is but it is our imperfect solution to a less than ideal situation. We don’t advertise the number system because again, we do not actually want people to line up for 2 hours before the event and for some of these events people don’t arrive that early and we don’t use the numbers at all. We are deliberately vague when people ask about the ticketing and say that tickets are not distributed until ten minutes before but that sometimes a line will form and they may want to keep an eye out for that happening. They will often ask if they SHOULD get in a line and we will never say one way or the other because again, we don’t actually want to encourage an early line. Also now like with Disney, some people know that we use the numbers when it gets to a certain point and they definitely do have an advantage over someone walking in to one of these events for the first time. I get it, it is sort of unfair but it is the best way we can handle these events. There are many reasons for this that I won’t get into here because this is already too long but basically this is our operating plan and it is not going to change.
I suspect Disney similarly would prefer that people not line up at 4:00 am most of the time but they realize that people are going to line up regardless and once they have a number of people in line exceeding the number they can accommodate, it makes no real sense for them to hold back in boarding pass distribution. Maybe they should take a more vague approach like we do about whether distribution might happen earlier rather than the blanket statements about the time it will occur - that is my only real complaint about how they handled some of this. But I even sort of understand why they don’t do that - they maybe hoped that giving a definitive answer with a definitive time “boarding pass distribution will not start until X” that people would not arrive as early and arrive closer to X. But once more people arrived before X than they knew they had spaces to give, they moved to open because it doesn’t actually matter for anyone arriving after that point. My one quibble is that maybe sticking to the actual advertised distribution time rather than just distributing once X number of waiting people was reached could potentially help train people to not arrive so early in the future knowing that the announced time is the real time but that might not even be the case. If people know there are a very limited number of passes available they are going to want to be at the front whatever time things open so they’d probably come just as early.
Anyway TL
R but I think the way they are doing things is definitely not perfect but I get it and I don’t know what they could do differently when the ride is so limited right now in capacity. Someone is always going to get screwed out of riding. And since they have so many breakdowns now and seem to dump the whole queue every time, letting everyone wait in standby doesn’t seem like a real answer either - it would also have elements of unfairness to it. Maybe advanced online boarding group booking that is similar to but separate from the FP system is the way to go moving forward with a set time before your trip that booking opens would be the most fair way?