I apologize for the book, but I just got back from my June 20th - June 28th trip, and I think I have some information that some may find interesting.
I was able to participate in the Dining with an Imagineer event. Ate lunch at Brown Derby. The imagineer we ate with was David Rothman, a Show Design and Production Manager, who just so happened to work on Frozen Ever After.
I tried to prod as much as I could about the problems the ride faced, but keeping in mind that I still had to sit next to the guy for 2 hours, I wasn't trying to force any information, or ask him any questions that seemed "negative" or "confrontational". I still had other non-Frozen Ever After questions to ask him, so I wanted to make sure we had a decent raport, as to avoid "on the fence" answers for the other questions.
I also did not get the vibe that he was only giving "Disney" answers. They genuinely seemed to be his own opinion, but who knows...
Anyways, I did ask him what was the biggest challenge they (the Frozen Even After team) faced. His answer was time. The amount of time they were given was the least amount of time he was ever given for a project (he's work for the company for 30+ years). He said that he believes any project can get accomplished if three things are present. Money, time, and the will to get it done. They had the money because they gave them such little time. He said this project was so fast tracked that money really wasn't a problem. They all wanted to do the best that they could do.
After all that was said, I asked him specfically how the technology went throughout the process. He said that was surprisingly very smooth. I thought that was kind of odd, reading about things here. I was going to ask specfically about the ride vehicles getting stuck, wording my question like, "So with changing the track up, how does that affect the already exisiting vehicles, do they get stuck or something?" but unfortunately someone asked a different question that ended up changing the topic. I was never able to go back to asking about Frozen Ever After. He also spoke about the Marshmallow AA and just how big it is, and how they had to get it into the building. That was actually a really interesting story.
With all of that, I was able to get on the ride on the 27th. My fiancee and I had a fastpass for 7pm. When we arrived the ride was down due to mechanical problems. I think around 745ish the ride opened up again, so we got in the fast pass line. We waited about half an hour in the fast pass line.
When we boarded and took that first turn to see Olaf, it really was something else. The animatroic was extremely fluid...I mean, the way it moved combined with the projected eyes...it truly looked like a real Olaf.
After that it was a little lackluster for my taste. As others have said, there really was no story. It was more of a "highlight reel". The animatronics for Anna and Elas were fantastic; the movement was very life like...however, I'm not a fan of the projected faces. Not sure what it was, but it just seemed off to me. Also, when we went past the scene were Anna and Kristoff were singing Love is an Open Door, it seemed like their mouths were our of sync from the audio...nothing sever...maybe a couple hundred milliseconds, but it was enough for me to notice. To be fair, I'm the kind of person that can tell when a syndicated show has been sped up for broadcast (TBS does that a lot).
When we entered the Grand Pabbie scene, his face was flickering between the actual color of his face and this muted red color. That was really the only "bad show" piece I remember seeing.
The Let it Go scene was pretty good, but I felt that it was lacking. To me it was pretty much an empty room with an AA Elsa in the middle on a balcony. There was no reason why we went backwards either (again, a problem with the lack of story in my opinion).
So here's my conclusion...
I was impressed with the ride from an AA perspective. There were some set scenes that were really well done (first room) and some that was just so lazy (the projection of the snow while you go up the belt to the Let it Go scene).
The lack of story is what killed it for me. Just kind of boring. At least with other dark rides (like The Haunted Mansion) there is so much going on around you that you can re-ride multiple times and see something different. With this...there wasn't anything that I feel like I missed, and I'm constantly looking at the details of things. I'll get into a scene, look at the key animatronic of the room, and then start looking around for other things. If there were things there it didn't grab my interest.
That's my $0.02 deposit...