Quote Originally Posted by Tekneek View Post
I suppose it depends on whether you think judging the actions of the company today in comparison to Walt's values and beliefs are reasonable or not.
This is a valid point.

My stance on it is that, yes it is unreasonable. It has been almost 50 years since Walt passed away. The company has evolved over that time, and has lost ALL ties to its founder (in the way of actual blood relatives being in charge of anything substantial in the company). Every new CEO, President, Vice President, etc. has his/her own ideas about what the Disney company should be. We have to, at some point, abandon OUR wishes (and our sense of "what would Walt have wanted") and allow these people to take the reigns and hopefully, steer the company in a direction that is at least mostly consistent with what had been established in the past. The problem is that mistakes have been made, and the best way to fix them lies with the current people in charge.

Walt never even saw WDW finished. To try to guess what he "would have wanted to do" is futile. No one but WALT knew, truly, how his own mind operated, and what ambitions he had. I can assure you, as a boy who grew up quite poor, he was intent on making money in the long run. Perhaps his dreams in the early years (and his constant state of financial burden, bankruptcy, etc.) was because his dreams were not in line with the economic reality of the time. He was constantly being put "in check" by his brother, the "money man."

What Walt would have wanted, then, probably would have ALWAYS been more than what he could reasonably attain.

I think this idea of a residential community ON WDW property is just about as close to the original EPCOT idea as we will get. The bottom line is, EPCOT in its ORIGINAL form would have never worked, as much as Walt believed in it. The execution of something like that would have been fraught with logistical problems, the least of which is the invasion of privacy that residents would have felt, being showcased in the middle of what is otherwise a VACATION destination.

This development, as mentioned, is being placed on land that was not being used (nor had future plans) for anything else. It is tucked away from guest areas. The WDW plots of land available for future development are still numerous and spacious enough to support several projects. They are not taking the LAST plot of land that is empty and turning it into a "cash cow". They are taking ONE plot of land to do so.