I haven’t had a chance to read thru all these, but I will give my tips based on visiting. We had 2 slots yesterday: 8am and 8pm. I’m currently chilling at Hungry Bear waiting for my third slot.
The 8am slot is golden! Best way to get in and have a relaxing time. By 10:45, the wait time was 5 minutes and there was a lot of free space and openness. Same thing for the last couple hours of the night. The overlap is the tricky part and hard to avoid for most people. Best thing is to have a plan of attack:
1) if you want to do a lightsaber or Oga’s, you are really going to need to pick one. The lines for both are insane and you will take up all your time.
2) set up your mobile food order early. You can do it that day, pretty much once Disneyland opens, and you don’t need to even have entered the park. Once the lunch crowd enters, the available time slots get filled up quickly. You can set up multiple mobile orders for times later in the day. If you miss that time slot then the order just expires and you don’t get charged. You can also cancel it. You just can’t modify it. Otherwise lines for Docking Bay 7 were long at meal times.
3) if you have an overlapping time and you don’t want to do Savis or Oga’s, then spend your first hour getting food. Maybe shopping. Wait to ride Smugglers until the overlap has ended. The wait time will go down significantly. The single rider line is also an excellent option; we had one 10 minute wait (during an overlap when standby was 90 min) but the other times it was a walk-on via SR. You do miss the repair Bay and Hondo animatronic with SR though, so do Standby at least once.
4) for the ride, my favorite was pilot (right side then left side). I didn’t mind engineer, though you do get thrown around a bit. Gunner was my least favorite. Again, those are my opinions. Everyone has different preferences!
5) all food I had at Docking Bay 7 was great. Batuubacha tea was gross. Blue milk was good, Green was too floral; apparently some people mixed them and said it was good, but I haven’t tried yet.
6) Droid depot was fun, and not too bad of a line. The cash registers were a bit slow, so maybe before getting in line to make your droid, pick you other merch and you can buy all at once.
7) they aren’t being crazy strict about the time limits. You won’t be allowed to ride the ride, and I didn’t try to order food or shop, but you can still walk around the land. You may even have luck picking up a mobile order (more likely Ronto or milk stand), but YMMV. They aren’t doing full sweeps of the land. But 4 hrs is a good amount of time for a particular slot.
8) Rey will wander the land, even without a character attendant. Try to see if you can see Chewie when he’s inspecting the Falcon. He may be unhappy with you!
Just try to take time to experience the land. I loved just sitting in areas and hearing and watching all the effects! I haven’t had time to experiment with the app yet.
Let me know if you have any questions!