I think this is where “modern IP & updated technology” and “pound-for-pound production quality” become two different conversations.
For me, since Diagon Alley, USF has taken a pretty noticeable dip in overall ambition and detail.
Fallon replaced a physical attraction with what feels like an off-the-shelf simulator.
I don’t even think we need to talk about Beetlejuice or Earthquake.
Terminator was a celebrity-filled, multi-million-dollar production with start to finish theming. Bourne has cool tech, screens, and effects, but the pre-show feels cheap, you can literally see green screen reflections on the actors, and the main show blows its biggest “wow” moment in the first minute instead of building to a huge finale. They also removed fantastic effects with no equivelant replacement (such as the theater fog blast, dropping chairs, animatronics)
Minion Land is a poor excuse of a “land.” The world's premier movie studio park now opens directly into a cheap-feeling Minion area. Something like “Illumination Studios” would have made way more thematic sense.
DreamWorks Land is where I really feel the loss in detail. Yes, kids like it, and yes, the IP is more current. But if you stripped the characters away, I think most kids would have had more fun in Kidzone.
Starting with Fievel's Playland- That area had layers: the water slide, ball pit, climbing areas, the flying ant animatronic, little physical details everywhere.
Even the Trolls coaster is a downgrade in the small stuff. Woody Woodpecker’s Coaster had an interactive queue with bells and whistles, and the station had those little details like the coaster train “chipping” away at the wood on the roof with a sound effect as it passed through. Trolls Trollercoaster has none of that. It’s flat cutouts of Trolls characters and pop music.
The George play area becoming a room with a TV screen in the middle is another perfect example of what I mean. Any kid would have more fun playing in the Curious George Ball Pit than they would talking to a Panda on a TV screen.
Same with DreamWorks Imagination Celebration. They removed the live actor pre-show, replaced it with three TV screens, cut the in-theater aerial effects, removed the talking costumed characters, removed the playground-style post-show, and even stopped using the lifting stage trap door. It just feels like a lot of little production-value touches disappeared.
The only one I’d really call a lateral move is Villain-Con, because Shrek 4-D was built in 4 months with minimal effort. FOUR months, isn't that crazy? They boarded up Hitchcock and put the Shrek movie into the existing 4D theater.
So I get why people may prefer the newer IPs or think the areas are more useful now. I’m just saying that from a production-value standpoint, USF feels like it has been trading physical detail and theatrical ambition for cheaper, flatter replacements. It's one thing to bring in new IP, but you need to make sure the new attraction is better, or equivalent, to what it replaced.