Are touringplans.com custom touring plans still reliable?

[Clmach73]

Our family is visiting Disney World in the middle of July this year and I'm not sure if I can still rely on the custom plan creator on Touringplans.com. We have used them in the past with success, but our last trip was in 2017 and wow have things changed since then.
Some of the plans on their site do some really strange recommendations like telling me to use our first 7am genie+ pick as Beauty and the Beast Stage show and head straight to the Flying Saucers ride first at early entry rope drop at Hollywood Studios. This sounds crazy to me and everything I've read on recent strategies would definitely have the first stop at 830am to be Slinky Dog,
Rise of the Resistance, Mickey and Minnie's runaway railroad or Tower of Terror. Also, It keeps scheduling Me to make my 2nd Genie+ everyday around 830 am? From what I've read you can't make your 2nd pick, after the 7am pick, until you've ridden the ride or the park has been open for two hours. Is the Touringplans.com still being maintained and updated? Is it still a reliable source to build a ride strategy on? Having a hard time trusting it when its algorithms seem to ignore the strategies that I read on other blog posts that I know have been written recently. Does anybody have any recent relevant experiences with Touringplans.com and using their plan building software? Is there better source I should be relying on to build my daily strategy?

Any help or advice you guys can provide would be greatly appreciated! Thanks.

 

[sponica]

I know they've been doing a lot of testing recently for both with and without genie+, and I'm sure by the time they have it validated, we'll know how exactly we'll be pre-scheduling lightning lanes next year.

 

[g-dad66]

I can't speak to touringplans.com in general (have never used it), but you are correct that scheduling Beauty and the Beast LL at 7:00 am, and rope-dropping Alien Swirling Saucers makes no sense at all.

You are also correct that you can book LL#2 two hours after park opens (or when you tap into LL#1 if it is less than 2 hours).

 

[sponica]

The only other thing I can think of is to set it to decrease walking time. I used some of their plans as guidance without sticking to them, and it seemed ok-ish

 

[mroulier]

I had really good success with them on my 2010 trip (back in the FastPass days!) but trying to add in G+ and LL's seems to throw their system off kilter. I was trying to create one for AK where we would rope drop Avatar and Navi, and then LL the Safari and use ILL$ to get back to Avatar in the afternoon. But after a while it kept making my Avatar Ill$ for 12 noon FIRST, and then tell me I couldn't fit in the rest of my stuff after my 2pm Park hopper departure time. Only think I could do was remove the ILL and then it gave me nice precise reading of wait times and the best walking route. And then we'd have to jam in the ILL$ whenever it might pop up. I also had to remove the Nemo show because it told me to wait 39 minutes in between, instead of doing other rides and going back to the show.

 

[unrequited23]

I understand your second guesses. My optimized personalized custom plan had me rope dropping the carousel during EMH for our upcoming trip in June. So, I make my plan following other strategies, then save a copy of it. I will evaluate the original and optimize the copy, then compare. Sometimes the optimized plan shows me an order that I didn't think of, and sometimes it predicts a 15 minute wait for Jungle Cruise at 10:30 am in June.