The way you described it was the way I started out as well, except that in all these years I only stayed onsite once and vowed I would never do it again. It was to limited and way, way to confining. I could easily pay for a weeks car rental for the extra it cost for one day in a Disney Resort.
Admittedly it is tougher now because for years I bought a 10 day park hopper which never expired and I could decide on a whim when I was going and for how many days. I was free to do other things because I didn't have to commit to whatever ticket I bought for the one experience. To me that was the beginning of the end for my many Florida adventures. I hated FP from the first day and wrote to Disney to tell them what a kick in the teeth that was for the common folk but the paper FP did give one a bit more flexibility because you didn't have to commit to a park ahead of time. So to compensate I just spend fewer days there then I did before. I still get to see the other places and don't feel that I have to devote all my time to Disney. If it rained I went to indoor flea markets instead of the parks with no loss of anything.
Other then that the changes had very little affect on my touring. I still stayed offsite, had breakfast before I went in, picked up lunch at a quick service place onsite and left after the 3 O'clock parade and had a full meal at whatever restaurant I had a hankering for. Rested the old bones for a few minutes and then I returned in the evening to the park I was in or whatever other one that hit my mood. I never worried about FP's in the evening.
I don't go to Disney for more then 2 days on any trip now. They want to make my life structured, I don't need them. I can get all the theme park exposure that I want from Uni or the hundreds of tourist traps outside. They have had to be much higher quality now since Disney and Universal have raised the bar. Besides during that long decade of inactivity they quietly began purging the imagineers that had been there long enough to be drawing big salaries out of the company. They went to Universal in many cases and it is getting harder to tell them from a Disney park anymore.
Don't get me wrong I still love WDW and try to go once a year even though I'm hitting close to 72 years old now. I still go solo quite often. But, I enjoy variety and the freedom to wander around and find new things and new places to visit is a bigger draw now that Disney has basically decided that they don't really care if I go there or I don't. They are after much bigger bucks that I don't have. So what I do have I spread around to other deserving enterprises outside those 42 sq. miles.
I agree that losing that early Disney feel was a huge loss! And it all started not with a mouse, but with a Fast Pass. That was the beginning of the end of leisurely Disney vacations and the start of frustrating, anger inducing stand-by lines. I'm at the age now that I cannot count on my health being good enough to go, so each visit I look upon as possibly my last one. The loss of that feeling angers me enough that I can feel better if I get to a point where I cannot go anymore simply because they have sucked the fun right out of it.
