Just back from M-R park days last week. Some observations of our experience.
Short Story: we walked on/very short waits on just about everything and only waited 25min once for Mickey's railway at early entry rope drop. But we paid for the extras. So at least for last week our experience was that paying the premium meant no more lines basically. We only do trips every few years so we splurged.
Boo Bash Sun 10/24 night - we were able to do all 4 "mountains/mines" back to back with minimal waiting starting around 8pm. Mine Train was 15 min actual during fireworks/25 min posted. Maybe because we had some rain that cleared people out (was raining while we were on Splash Mtn.) We didn't do treat lines but they seemed short, and we did get the ice cream & drinks with no wait at a cart near the adventureland/hub entrance. We didn't see any long treat lines. Crowds didn't seem bad - even those staying for fireworks wasn't intense...plenty of room to walk around them. Rain again was probable reason.
We did utilize Genie + and some extra paid IA$ LL's. We did early entry for resort guests every day except our Animal Kingdom day because we had a FOP IA$ and just didn't see a reason to rope drop given the rain and lower crowds that day. We skipped deluxe after hours because we got so much done during normal hours.
I will say
MK and HS were definitely the best use of our Genie+, we only ever were waiting in standby lines when they were walk ons/10min or less. There was tons of G+ availability for rides with huge standby waits (like Peter Pan) well into the evening for return times within that hour except maybe Slinky. It seemed Genie+ would recalibrate and release new slots often. If you saw 5pm as next avail...refresh in a little bit and 3pm would show up, etc. I loved doing parks early, eating lunch back at hotel/swimming and booking my early evening LL at hopper park while lounging.
Epcot and AK we probably could have skipped the $15 G+ and just only did a IA$ for Remy/Frozen and FOP and been fine. There were just so many short standby lines at those parks, Soaring for instance was 10min wait even at 10am when we had a LL. Luckily we park hopped those days to MK and HS so were able to grab some value back in the evenings at the parks with more things to do.
I was able on my HS day to get Slinky Dog right at 7am for 9:45am and then it had already bumped past 11am and then into 1pm by 7:02am. I then grabbed a Rise paid for 10:30am with lots of availability left. So
grab Slinky first before Rise!!
We got stuck on Rise in the stormtrooper room for 30min and left and got an anytime recovery FP for it. We came back and rode it at 7:30pm at night with no issues. Loved it. Our cousins got stuck on it/evacuated 3 times that day!!!
We experienced often when headliner rides said 20min they were actually walk-ons or only 5-10 min waits. Space Mtn, Millenium Falcon, Mickey railway past dinner time all had this occur. So that was nice!
We bought Remy one afternoon literally an hour before going on it. Glad we did because I pulled a virtual group #68 right at 7am the next day and they were having issues and didn't get to that group until after 5pm when we were already at our dinner in another park.
Steakhouse 71 was a last minute lunch grab and was great food. I'd eat lunch there again in a heartbeat.
Character meets were having soft openings in MK on our last day but only for short windows of time. We didn't get to do them, but heard from people who did.
I don't know if people will catch on to using LL/IA$ and my above experience will be different next time. I probably overpaid as there were times we didn't really need it. But ultimately since this was a once in a long time trip for some of my extended family it made sense for us. If I went more often/was local I'd probably be more ticked off about the extra $.