They might make more in total as a rental. But, those earnings are over a long period of time (I'd hope the analysis mentioned above included the time-value of money in its calculations. If not, they are probably wrong.) Even so, selling it as a timeshare has two different advantages.
Advantage one: it returns capital faster, which looks better on the balance sheet (important for quarterly reports) and allows them to recycle the capital more often. So, it's not a one-to-one comparison for timeshare vs. hotel, because the same capital can be deployed to build more timeshare units than hotel units over the lifetime of the hotel.
Advantage two: It transfers the risk of reduced travel demand from the company to individual owners. I suspect this is a bigger reason why Disney has gone down the DVC route so aggressively. Those of us who were around TWDC during the 9/11 and Great Recession periods remember some pretty stark moves. They closed parts of Port Orleans during the 9/11 travel slump "for refurbishment" but really to get those rooms off the books. During the Great Recession, they ran a "buy 4 get 3" promotion on hotels/tickets---effectively giving a discount north of 40% on the room.
And we all remember what happened during the pandemic. DVC resorts re-opened first, and the others took a while to come back online.
There was also a good Laughing Place article that Kevin Yee wrote way back when that looked at a consultant/internal report about what Peak Oil might do to WDW's viability. The short verison: If oil got north of $X/bbl, WDW ceases to be an interesting business because flying becomes prohibitively expensive. $X was lower than you'd think.
Thankfully, fracking to the rescue on the whole oil thing. But. the lesson remains: having a huge resort dependent on the whims of the general public to travel is risky. Timeshare owners, on the other hand, have already paid for their lodging, and are contractually committed to continue doing so. That reduces their travel friction, and essentially builds in some structural demand for the product.
Since 9/11, Disney has opened precisely three cash resorts/resort components: AoA (which started construction prior to the attack), the Gran Destino Tower (convention business--a different beast), and parts of Aulani (Hawaii, also a different beast). Everything else is either new DVC builds, bulldozing cash rooms for DVC builds (CBR->Riviera, CR-North->BLT), or converting cash rooms to DVC (GFV2, Jambo, CCV).
They can't be, because they are not a general benefit, they are a Blue Card thing. Anything that is Blue Card is essentially paid for out of sales.
