I see this an epic fail on the part of Disney. Clearly, whoever made this decision never spent any time running a photography business. At any seminar on the business of photography, they stress "E-S-P". Expressions Sell Photographs!
You put a group of two or three little girls together with Tinkerbell and ask them all to look one way and smile, and you'll have to take 5 pictures to find ONE where they are all looking in the same direction and more than half are smiling! A really good photographer can direct the action and get a good shot with one or two shutter releases. It might take as long as 10 shots taken by the automatic camera, but the quality will be better, and the customers happier.
Personally, I've never really been happy with any of the photopass shots taken by photopass photographers. The backgrounds are too cluttered with people and such, and they bang out a few shots without spending a whole lot of time with anyone or taking a whole lot of care to see what's going on at the time the shutter is pressed. The closest I saw to good work was a photopass photographer working near the castle in the rose garden. He seemed to know what he was doing, and his pictures reflected that he knew more than "the basics".
