First, I want to clarify that I don't think of a momentary stop or brief interruption as a ride being "down." I'm only referring to times where rides were down for an hour or more. Or, in the case of ToT, when half of the ride capacity is down.
Yes. This is what started to really bug me after I came home and was no longer drinking the WDW Kool-aid. We paid an insane amount of money to fly to Orlando, stay at a deluxe resort and have access to the parks. We were expected to keep up our end of the purchase contract by paying for our trip 30 days in advance and showing up for all ADRs unless canceling at least 24 hours in advance. In return, it's reasonable to expect Disney is keeping their rides in working order. They have all the resources one can imagine to make that happen. For our last trip, POTC was closed for refurbishment and this time Splash. While we were a tad heartbroken to miss those rides during each trip, we understood that maintenance must be done.
But, what doesn't feel "fair" is walking up to a number of ride closures, to the point that it seems like a normal part of visiting WDW, with no compensation. We, as customers, are the only ones taking the hit for the downed rides. When Space Mountain was down for a couple of hours one morning, the waits were backing up at other Tomorrowland rides. We were at Tom Speedway where they had only SIX cars running while the other cars and tracks sat empty. We waited 25 minutes at 8:15am. How about moving some CMs to the surrounding rides to increase capacity? The intentional lowering of capacity to apparently reduce the amount of park resources each guest uses is something else that got to me over the trip, but that's another topic for another day.
I truly don't mean to be a Debbie Downer. Like I said, we had a fabulous trip! But, we are "cup half full" people and were there to have a good time and roll with the punches. If you look around too much or think too much it's easy to feel a bit taken by a number of the things that WDW does or doesn't do. Business is booming for WDW, though, so I guess what they're doing is working for them.