Was the old FP + system worse for vacationers? From what I remember it sounded better than having to wake up at 7am on vacation to buy Genie + and maybe get to use it on 2-3 rides.
It
sounds good on paper, BUT:
-As said above, if you're not staying with Disney at night, you had basically no shot of getting the newest rides. In 2017, we would NOT have gotten either of the Avatar rides, Seven Dwarfs Mine Train, or Frozen without staying on site.
-WDW has drastically worse ride capacity than DLR, so if every person automatically gets 3 reservations per day, and can be booked in advance, the overall number of things you can book in one day goes down pretty fast.
-Especially because literally everything more complicated than, say, Tiki Room, the Railroad, or the Riverboat had FP+. So what happened with Monsters Inc at DCA, happened to almost all the attractions at every park. At WDW of all places, where even the park with the best capacity (MK) has a fair amount less capacity than Disneyland, and where some parks have around nine rides total.
-Additionally, the FP+ apologists tend to minimalize this, but the non-MK parks were tiered. So you couldn't get BOTH TT or Soarin', you had to pick one-assuming you reserved in advance and they were available. You couldn't get BOTH TSMM and RNRC, you had to pick one. Once Pandora opened, you couldn't get both Pandora attractions. Invariably this meant it was difficult to get three attractions where FP+ would actually have been helpful in some parks, regardless of how early you were able to book. Epcot was particularly bad for this. This was great for Disney because they could shunt people into places that were less busy to more evenly distribute demand; not so great for a consumer who could tell the difference between FEA and the current Figment attraction.
-If you were a poor schmuck who walked into the park not knowing any of this and learned about FP+ when you walked in the gates, you were pretty much SOL.
Getting three FPs guranteed sounds nice, but getting much beyond those three (particularly anything good) was FAR more difficult than using FP/MP/LL at DLR. And that's assuming you actually got three good rides and you didn't end up stuck with, say, Journey into Imagination with Figment, Turtle Talk, and Living with the Land (which I like, but let's be honest, almost nobody is going to Epcot primarily to ride LWTL).
Imagine walking into DLR pre-LL and finding out, at park open, that Space Mountain and Indy were out of FPs for the day because they'd been gobbled up a month or two before by Disney hotel guests. That's what FP+ did to WDW. Can't say I liked it much.
But people who didn't do the comparison math or didn't know what they were missing loved it, so now some spin FP+ as this tragically missed gem of a service that WDW so rudely snatched away from them.
