What's ridiculous is that you're insisting your feelings and emotions prevail over facts. A great example of truthiness:
truth·i·ness - the quality characterizing a "truth" that a person making an argument or assertion claims to know intuitively "from the gut" or because it "feels right" without regard to evidence, logic, intellectual examination, or facts.
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Disney has always chased profits -- before, during & after Eiser.
-- WDW has never been a cheap place to visit; the prices of its deluxe properties rivaled those of top, 5* hotels around the country, even in the 1970s.
-- Disney never even offered a toll-free reservations number to the public and for years hours were limited to business hours, meaning the average person had to spend a few bucks per call to inquire about & book rooms (in the '80s and '90s).
-- As mentioned several times, cost is discussed extensively in travel guides printed in the 1980s and 1990s (including books like the Unofficial Guide and features stores in publicans like the New York Times).
-- Food & beverage have historically been the biggest rip-off. Disney began charging $2 for a bottle of soda & water in the mid-1990s -- an era in which they could be bought for less than half that at the local drugstore.
-- In the early 1990s, Disney began offering reservations for its Millennium celebration, offering guests the opportunity to lock in their rate with a refundable deposit. By the late 1990s, Disney started notifying guests who booked such rooms that 'opps - we undervalued the market 10 years ago, therefore that guaranteed rate you reserved at the Dixie Landings for $109/night is now $500/night.' Yes, the prices were that high, which undoubtedly played into the mass cancellations that resulted in cheap rooms being dumped onto the market in the latter half of 1999 (like our $189/night AP discounted room at the Grand Floridian).
-- Disney slashed the budgets for the Disneyland expansion as well as the Animal Kingdom Park. The latter performed terribly during guest previews (resort guests) but Disney didn't care.
-- In 2000, Disney entered an extreme cost cutting mode.
we could go on and on...
Reality is that by the early 2000s, WDW had overexpanded and its latest projects (West Side, Animal Kingdom, etc.) had flopped and failed to deliver the attendance gains that had been anticipated. Coupled with a softening economy (that free-fell after 9-11 and again during the Great Recession), guests received some incredible, heavily discounted deals.
WDW has since embarked on controlled expansion (both hotels & within the parks) since. Of course, some people like you want to pretend that WDW actually cared more about its guests than profits at one point... to each their own. You can mock me all you'd like, but I certainly don't live in Fantasyland -- and at the very least, can back my assertions with actual fact, unlike you.
