Although my goal when updating the site is to feign ambivalence about what WDW has become, how much of it's worth remembering and whether this site can serve a useful, long-term purpose in describing an increasingly small percentage of its lost features, almost everything here is a product of having reached these conclusions:

WYW is intended for a narrow spectrum of Disney fans

A) People who grew up with and/or worked at WDW during its first 20 years, and/or
B) People who missed out on that time period but find the subject appealing and/or
C) People who abide dubious forums for topics they care about. 

I'm not a historian

A real WDW historian's website would eventually have a Golf Resort page, but I'd rather make 100 Polynesian pages than make a first one for The Golf Resort.  I can barely type the world golf without taking a nap in the middle.  There are other people, however, doing a great job of covering parts of WDW that don't interest me.  Golf.  Jeez.  Mini -golf, on the other hand ...
  
The WDW of my youth (and probably yours) is gone forever

Even if Disney rebuilt Mr. Toad's Wild Ride inch for inch, it wouldn't sit opposite 20,000 Leagues Under The Sea or just down the path from the Plaza Swan Boats; it was the combination of all those great elements that made early WDW wonderful to me as a child, not a few magnificent pieces.  The pieces that remain, though, are still valuable and sit on sacred ground.  

WDW today is a ponderous combination of the old, the new, the good, the bad and the incomprehensible

While great new attractions have been added since the 1980s, concurrent with that decade's end began the routine disappearance of fantastic older features, the "fixing" of things that weren't broken and renovations that discounted aesthetic foundations laid by WDW's original designers.  By the turn of the last century, the challenges WDW faced in maintaining itself were daunting.  Pearly white shorelines became weed gardens, animated figures were removed or left inoperable in multiple locations and disinterested cast members became less an exception if not quite a rule.  As if all that wasn't enough, the average guest also got way nastier over time*.  This puts the modern-day WDW at odds with its majestically clean and thematically integrated former self of 1971-1986.

That's sad, but less sad with every passing year.  Few people see continuity between what WDW was in 1971 and what it is now.  Some are still looking, though, and I wish those seekers the best on their journey.  I'll stay here and scan old pictures for you.      

There's no right or wrong reason to like, or dislike, today's WDW

My son thinks Test Track is one of the best things on Disney property and I'll never know how much he would have enjoyed World of Motion.  We agree on one thing, though: at present we'd both rather spend a day at Fun Spot than Epcot.  It's just so much easier.   

It may be annoying for some younger WDW fans to hear people like me suggest that they missed out on the best of WDW, and if you're a big Everest fan then you'd probably choose the WDW of 2011 over the WDW of 1978, but we're just talking about opinions.  WDW means a lot of different things to a lot of different people, and the difficult heart on my sleeve didn't come with a crown making me King of Everybody.  If it had, everyone would be too busy making onion rings and Pamela Tiffin clones to waste time worrying about jacked-up Yetis.  But one of my main goals with this site was to piece together a low-grade vision of how cool the old WDW was to me, and in what ways specifically, before it changed.  One of the most direct ways of accomplishing that is by employing comparison, so I might come across as dismissive toward stupid stuff like Aladdin's carpets completely compromising the Sunshine Pavilion's forecourt.

Taking aim at Walt Disney Imagineering's mistakes isn't the same as chaining its designers to pillories and braining them with rotten fruit 

First of all, it's hard to get them to a pillory because they wriggle around like the dickens.  Furthermore, even if someone said Enchanted Tiki Room: Under New Management was the worst attraction ever put in front of an audience, that it lent new depth to the word "abhorrent" and that it would have made Walt Disney cry like the Indian in the Keep America Beautiful commercial, it wouldn't equate with hating the show's writers.  They may be nice and otherwise talented people who meant well.  But if your mother, Tom Hanks and the Dalai Lama make a film to raise awareness of third-world famine and the result is Howard The Duck Saves the Garbage Pail Kids , it's still (at best) a case of good intentions gone amok.  Likewise, if WDI's most congenial artists ruin original WDW attractions in an effort to bring them relevance, people will still be unhappy.  Unless it's CircleVision 360, in which case almost no one will notice or particularly care.   

Enchanted Tiki Room: Under New Management was the worst attraction ever put in front of an audience

It lent new depth to the word "abhorrent" and would have made Walt Disney cry like the Indian in the Keep America Beautiful commercial.

Of course no one really knows what Walt Disney would have done with the Tiki Room had he lived to see its 35th anniversary, which is why anyone who worked on the 1998 version could invoke the man's name as the utmost proponent of change to suggest that maybe, just maybe , Walt himself might have thought that introducing Miami Sound Machine to his classic attraction would constitute an upgrade.