The main issue I take with Pixar Pier (and potentially with the now non-Pixar Place) is that Pixar isn’t a theme in the sense that you can’t use it to answer the question of what themes tie all those properties together. And part of what’s nice about Pixar is that many of their films don’t really share thematic links, they cover a lot of different ground despite being the product of one studio.
What ties Mermaid, Small World, Philharmagic and the Tea Cups together is Fantasy. Which is why they all work in Fantasyland. That they all happen to be works of Disney is not a thematic unifier, because Disney is not a theme in any of them.
Single IP lands are a nice new flavor to add into the mix of potential ways of creating a themed land, and certainly Potter, Cars Land, and Pandora are exceedingly well-executed examples of such a style. The crux becomes, for such lands, that they be especially well selected for their respective parks based on their themes in order for the park to really be operating as a THEME Park. Hogsmeade and Pandora do this well, as Hogsmeade is an (is)land of adventure and Pandora is full of animals (if imagined) from a film that focused on many of the same themes as Animal Kingdom. Cars Land seems less to be connected to the themes of California Adventure, which are habitually poorly defined. Car Culture is big in California, sure, but the land seeks to transport you to a fictionalized version of Arizona for you to take part in it. When your theme is essentially the Golden State and an entire Land is based on a locale from not that state . . .
Pixar Pier seems to follow the same thematic trend as Cars Land, where more and more the park is less focused on preserving the notion of the theme it chose to define itself by in favor of acting as a catch-all for properties that didn’t or wouldn’t square neatly enough into Disneyland. The rides and treatment to the land may come as a pleasant surprise in their execution, but they don’t neatly sing of the park’s theme. Unless that theme is planning to change and we haven’t been made privy to it yet. Which, at this point, I think would probably be best, it’s so scarecly a California adventure anymore that it’s kind of silly they keep calling it that.