Wow. We were at MK on 4/29 and that was definitely not our experience. We had a 10 min wait at BTMR at 9:00 which in the past had been a walk on but Splash was down so, I think totally expected. They only had one side open but that would be expected at RD too. I don't expect Disney to have both sides open when the wait is 10 mins at opening. We rode Pirates at about 10:30 am and it was a 15 min wait. Maybe the issue with PotC in the evening was the fact that the ride was down for several hours in the afternoon. We saw people getting walked off it around 3. They said they had been stuck for half an hour. We had paper FPs for it were trying to use and it wasn't up yet at when we checked before dinner at 5:30. With that kind of down time the evening probably backed up with anytime FPs.
They had Space open on both sides by 9:30 am on 5/5. They had both sides of Pirates loading during the afternoon on 5/5.
i did not see any egregious capacity cutting on Disney's part but we also did a lot of FPs. We also felt like it was definitely not crowded but there were still a lot of people in the parks. I didn't look at the crowds on the pathways and then the wait times and feel they were disproportionally unbalanced. We had a great time and felt like we didn't wait much at all. But I did see a lot of late afternoon ride times of 1 hour with plentiful FPs for those same rides readily available on the app (yes I'm looking at you, TT) and wondered why people didn't even check.
I think it feels like there are more people in the park because there are fewer people in actual lines. That's a side effect of FP+ -- the average overall waiting time is probably down if you factor in the time you spend actually waiting for your rides during a day. Since a large percentage of ride goers are able to avoid a standby line, lot of people (who used to be waiting in a line) are now free to be doing other things like buying stuff or getting in the way of strollers until their FP time. FP also makes it easier to get in and out of rides faster than before, giving them more time to kill, and more time to spend in the "open."
Just a theory.