I guess it all depends on how you travel. We go once a year or so. We are solidly middle class. We do live in an inexpensive area. We bought the cheapest house in the nicest neighborhood. We rarely eat out. We drive basic but newer cars. We do all our home renovations and most repairs ourselves. We are frugal.
The reason we are frugal is we like to travel. From my signature you can see we have a large family. Traveling with the kids was expensive, most are out of the house now, so we just travel to visit them where they live. We always traveled when they were young. Not so many Disney trips but we've done 5 as a whole family. We camped in our own travel as it was the cheapest way but still very comfortable. Our kids are used to camping because we've camped all over the country. Once again that is based on our frugalness.
Now that it's fewer of us in the family we travel a little differently. Flights are reasonable. We book cheaper airlines and travel light. We still splurge a little on hotels especially at Disney. We are older now and know what we want in a room. This is our first year trying out DVC rental. We travel during off season. We get groceries for our rooms and don't do a lot of extras.
Honestly we still get the whole Disney experiance.
A couple years ago my daughter and I booked a free dining trip. It was great except that we both realized we aren't table service people and the
DDP is way too much food for us. I'm glad we did that trip though and all the character meals because it showed us that our usual WDW trips were exactly how we liked them.
I know this is long but basically you can do a relatively affordable trip at WDW. You don't need all the extras to make it special. Just set a budget and stay within it. Make travel and vacation a priority and it can happen. Maybe not every year but it is doable.