It's so weird to me, I was there from September 8-22 and it did not at all feel slow to me!
The weekend of the 13-15 seemed horribly crowded to me, I did not want to be there it was so bad but we had a friend with us just for those days, even in the morning it was very difficult and took us a long time to get through security and into the parks and even the mobile orders were taking a long time and fast passes were all gone for both parks pretty early...
Huh. I was there all day on September 14 and we didn't think it was too crowded at all, and my FP data for that day looks pretty moderate. This past Saturday was LIGHT YEARS more crowded than September 14! Absolutely no comparison.
I will say that September definitely did have evening crowds show up for the Electrical Parade, and also for Halloween Screams... so evenings in September, especially on weekends, felt a lot different than the daytimes.
So all of the comments that said Disney raising prices was the reason for the low crowds last Summer was absolute nonsense. Seems like crowds this Fall are just as bad as ever. No appreciable drop in attendance caused by Disney raising prices.
Ehhh, it's more complicated than that. As noted by many people on this thread, the bulk of the crowds right now are tourists, including what seem like an awful lot of first-time visitors. The price increase for spending a few days of Fall Break at Disney weren't
that significant, especially for people who were going to take a trip over break to begin with, you know? And I think that the "empty park" summer stories encouraged a lot of visitors, and a lot of people who wanted to check out SWGE thought that those crowds would "die down" by the fall so planned trips for here then... not realizing that things worked out very differently than they expected!
I do think that the higher prices factored in somewhat this summer. Locally, I know a LOT of APs who didn't renew this year (so in late August, when APs unblocked and the anticipated crowds didn't materialize, I think that was a big factor), and even some people who used to do something like a yearly birthday Disney day didn't do that this year, either, citing the prices. The thing is that people don't want to pay those higher prices and then have the parks be insane, which is what people
expected this summer. Local people will hold out for ticket deals (I can think of several families who'd had lower APs who said "we're not renewing and we'll just go three days next spring when the ticket deal is out" - they assume that deal will happen every year, which, of course, is debatable).
What's happened with crowds this year has been pretty fascinating, and I'm very curious to see what happens with the holidays this year and then ROTR opening in January. It's unprecedentedly unpredictable... and DL crowds have always been famously unpredictable!