I had asked on here if July or October would be better and got mixed responses. We haven't gone as a family since January 2013 so picking a good time to go was a big deal to me. It is hard to work around school schedules though, especially now that my kids are getting older. We planned a trip for October, but made a last minute decision to go in July. On day 3 of the PH tickets, we upgraded to Deluxe AP's. This is going to be our year of Disney and then we won't go back for a few years.
Well, we just got back from our initially scheduled October trip. As far as crowds, July 9-12 was so much nicer than October 12-14. I told my husband yesterday as we were waiting in a long security line that if we didn't have AP's I would probably be miserable with the crowds. My kids joked that there was a line for the line for the line. Line to get on the Toy Story bus (we stayed at the Homewood Suites and walked to the bus), line to get through security, and a line to get into the parks. All were so much worse on this trip than in July. I do think that July was nicer partially because the two So-cal passes were blocked. I had previously thought summer, especially July, was the high-peak/avoid at all cost time of year, but I have a different opinion now!
In July, we had a grand time with traditional fast passes that were available late, and quite often immediately. Maybe we just got lucky because they were experimenting with the fast pass system before Maxpass started a week later. Our first day we got there at 8pm and still got so much done, including fast passes for Indy and Matterhorn. On this trip, Maxpass is the only reason we rode any rides in the evenings. We did as much as we could in the mornings, then went back to the hotel by 1-2pm. At the hotel, I was diligent about lining up fast passes for evening. All stand-by lines were too long for us and most fast passes ran out by the time we got back to the parks. My advice: If you are going to be there when it is crowded and you care about rides, getting MaxPass is a must. On Friday night, the lines for Toy Story and RSR were over 2 hours. Several other rides were just as long, or nearly as long. Thursday was about the same. They kept announcing something about apologizing that the stand by wait time was going to be longer than expected. When we left RSR, the posted wait time was 150 minutes, but I wouldn't be surprised if some people waited longer. I do think Disney might scare away infrequent visitors if the crowds & lines are always that bad. When we left on Saturday around noon, there were lines at the ticket booths. I was curious if any were buying day tickets. I wanted to warn them about how bad the lines were. We still had a good time on our trip, but we certainly didn't do everything. I'm just glad we didn't pick October as our once every 3-4 year trip because I would have been disappointed.