There's no "generally speaking" that applies to crowds. It depends on the season, weather, events, holidays, etc., etc.!
I hate the term "locals", to me it's almost as annoying as "snowbirds". But to answer your question, people who live nearby absolutely come on weekends for Food & Wine Festival.
There's a fee to subscribe to touringplans.com, but you can see next month's crowd calendar for free. So for example, if you check on September 1, you will see the crowd calendar for all of October for free. But you can't see the current calendar without paying a fee.
We have gone many times in the second week of October and always found this time to be generally not crowded at all. We do try to do theme parks on weekdays and save shopping, tours, character dining for weekend days. It really helps to have park hopper so we can go to theme parks during the week and then use the weekend to revisit anything we have to do again!
Unless I am going to Extra Magic Hours, my best tip is to go to the park that had Extra Magic Hours the day BEFORE, since resort guests are likely to attend the EMH, and then won't be going to the same park the next day... Hope that makes sense.
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