During my time here on DIS, I have been in some fairly heated debates on the merits of free dining. Frankly, I never saw tremendous value: you either pay full price on your room and get the free dining discount, or you can get a good discount off the rack rate, but no free dining. Depending on scenarios and how well you could optimize the dining plan, there could be times in which it might have a slight advantage over the rack rate discount, but generally speaking, it is pretty close to a wash. Your mileage may vary.
I can't help but think that the FX rate - which is outside of Disney's control - is playing the bigger factor in your cost increase.
The exchange rate isn't the deciding factor. We spent 12 nights at Universal last December with that exchange rate.
I'm sure you've debated the merits of the FD promo to death so I'll try not to rehash that here. It's not just about the dollars for us. For 2 adults or 2 adults with small kids who don't eat much I would probably side with most of the points you would make.
The value for us was this:
2 parents and 1 large growing athletic teenage boy with a hole in his stomach. When I totalled the food bills up at the end of a trip they averaged about $2500 for the food we ate on dining plan. Typically at that time they were offering a 20% room only discount at CSR. For a 14 night stay that didn't come close to a $2500 discount. What we really liked though was eating guilt free. Meaning food was just credits. We didn't have to have that internal struggle with the cost if we wanted steak 3 nights in a row. It made the trips more enjoyable. Could we eat cheaper than $2500 on those trips? Of course. But that would decrease the enjoyment of the trip for us.
I looked at it like this:
If a 14 night magic your way pkg for 3 at CSR was $6500 and that included 90% of our food costs, and included what we called stress free, enjoyable dining, we thought it was a good value and booked it.
If we had to ad $1500 for food ($1500 not $2500, because we would guilt ourselves into eating cheaper) this wasn't good value and lessened our enjoyment.
Working the numbers with RO discount it ended up either costing about $1000 more or we had to comprise on the dining experience. So FD was the sweet spot for us. It's not just the cost, but the overall experience.
Make sense?
I'm a stubborn man of principle. Disney has taken away my vacation experience at the price point I liked. Yes, I'm bitter about it and I will vote with my wallet. We really enjoy WDW, but we aren't stuck on it like some DIS members. We'll just spend our money elsewhere.
I'm sure at some point we'll go to WDW again, it just won't be on a yearly basis and won't be onsite if they don't change the way they implement the room check policy. So instead of us dropping $10k-&15k a year at WDW, we'll drop it somewhere else. They'll see us once every 5-7 years instead of 2 full weeks every year.
They probably don't care. They're banking on enough new people to fill the spots of the disgruntled regulars they lose. We aren't going to the US at all this year. Dec 2019 we'll probably go to Universal for 2 weeks.
