Those are all very valid points, but I think in some cases they help my argument, so I'm going to address them individually, but first I want to list out some assumptions/conditions:
- Unless Imagineering has mastered manipulation of time, there is some number N that is the maximum amount of people the ride could possibly service under perfect conditions.
- Conditions will never be perfect so you chop some headroom off that, let's call this C, the rides typical reasonable capacity.
- Disney wants to get as close to C as possible without going over.
- Disney generally wants to maintain full control of their environment with room to exercise discretion as needed without having to worry about violating 3.
- Disney is generally pretty secretive about park operations.
If we don't agree on those 5, I'm not sure we can get anywhere, but I think they're fairly self evident. On to the discussion, I'm going to address the end of your post first for clarity:
That's super totally fine! Really I just think it's a fascinating topic, and I enjoy debating it and I appreciate you coming to the table with your insights. I hope I'm not coming across rude to anyone, I'm really just excited to think about the possibilities, it's such a complex system they run every day of the year, there must be some magic behind it. As I said above to
@mesaboy2 we'll probably never get concrete answers, but it's fun to speculate and see the different perspectives.
You are exactly right! This is why Disney must hold back some capacity for all rides, because the only way to deal with this sort of uncertainty is to have excess resources available to address whatever happens. A common theme in logistics is the risk/reward of tying up resources in uncertain events. When organizations consume all their resources on the presumption nothing will change (all their eggs in one basket) it has a high tendency to end badly for them. Disney would want to have available capacity for the rides in the event they need to accommodate these sort of things. They would never want guests complaining that their FP time got bumped by someone else on a VIP tour.
Again, completely and totally correct! This also falls under the purview of needing room for adjustment, that really is the universal theme here (no pun intended). With the amount of data and engineering they have available, they actually can predict within reason the failures and crowds and weather, but not perfectly. Sometimes things just go completely sideways. The only way to deal with that is reserved resources that can be called in, which you can't do if you already promised them to someone else months earlier.
I can't cite specific data (because Disney doesn't publish ride demand vs capacity data unfortunately, I'd nerd all over that) so this one is just a hunch, but artificial scarcity is an effective and commonly used tool. I'd be surprised if they weren't employing it here.
Fun talk,
Matt