Must've had a different experience with the pulsing...
I will say, off the bat, our group was selfishly looking forward to this night, expecting little to no waits. While the pulsing, in theory, may help better with the house experience, we didn't expect this night to have us be waiting 30-40 min for some of the houses.
We did get there later, around 8 - so we couldn't get that head start. IF we pushed ourselves, we could've maybe done all 10; but we weren't looking to do that. In 4 hours, we did 5 houses, with occasional breaks.
We waited 35-40 for Halloween with a posted 20, we waited 30-40 for Seeds with a posted 15. Stranger Things was closer to 45, but it was listed at 35. At one point, Dead Exposure was a 70 min wait, with Slaughter at 45 so we just skipped that....
Was it the hellscape it's been for the past 4 weeks? No. Was it dead? Kinda sorta..but not really, either.
As for the pulsing itself, it was hit or miss. Trick r Treat seemed to fare best, but that's not surprising with their Gestapo Ops team. Seeds was fine, too - ignoring we almost waited double. Scary Tales had a few hiccups, it seemed that they had 2 pulse lines? One to enter the SS, then one as you turn to the facade? IDK. One of their Ops members was hurrying us through, which was odd since, ya know, we were walking at a normal pace and they were pulsing.... We were already caught up to the people ahead of us by scene 4 or so.
Stranger Things though. Woof. Ops separated our group of about 7 because they only let "10 through". We explained they were separating our group and that's not how it's supposed to work. Ops responds "We're letting only a certain amount of people at a time", which we fired back "that's why you ask how many in the party and assess from there...". He just let our group go to catch up, and by the time we caught up to our people, it was already at a conga line again.
We ended up leaving at 12. We thought about doing Poltergeist, but it was listed at an hour, and while waiting for Scary Tales, we noticed that their line seemed to move at a snail's pace.. we just bailed as we didn't want to deal with it anymore.
IDK how to feel about the pulsing - considering their Ops team is already notorious for being a detriment to the event. I think the event is too big to integrate it in a way they want to. Even with the pulsing, my runs weren't that much different than those during the conga lines.