While it is a family attraction, not everyone can ride. If you can't sit up on your own, you cannot ride. So babies and some handicapped people would not be able to ride. My son may be one of them, especially since one of the workers told my nurse they have to be able to walk to ride it. This excludes all wheelchair bound people. I am hoping this is not true and that employee has no clue what they are talking about.
But outside of the everyone can ride thought they had, they failed to realize some people just might not want to ride it every time they want to see the penguins. Wild Arctic is fun and all, but many times (even prior to kids who can't ride it) we would go the walking route because we just wanted to see the animals and didn't care to wait in line to ride wild arctic for the 50th time. Many local families go to Sea World with their kids a lot. It is a cheaper park and for kids that are smaller can be a fun park to go to and use like you would use your local zoo. Orlando doesn't have a zoo like I grew up with, so that is how I use it with my kids too. So now any locals who get tired of the ride, won't really want to wait in long lines just to see penguins, which when it used to be there was a HUGE hit for my kids.
So while I think a walking part of the attraction would have been good and this could have still limited the amount of guests in the area, they should have probably also built a glass part of the attraction. The traditional behind the glass area for people to still see the penguins (this could have been a come and go as you please no line like the old one) that don't want to wait in any line, but also can't handle the extreme cold. This is going to be another issue for some guests who want to stay and watch the penguins longer, but can't due to the cold. Those people can see the penguins up close and then move to the glass normal temp area.
Also, outside of getting bored and not wanting to ride, to not everyone being able to ride, they totally forgot about capacity. How many people can this ride handle per day vs. how many people attend the parks. We have talked about this with other parks and many rides not everyone wants to ride or not everyone can ride. But when it comes to an animal area it is completely different. Because I can't imagine too many people go to Sea World and plan to not see the penguins. Plus you think everyone can see animals. So now you just have limited the number of people that can see a popular animal based on how many people can ride the ride in a day.
Again, no one had their thinking caps on when coming up with this idea. If they did, they could have prevented so many parts of this that are such a huge fail.