The Harden's: Final Disney thoughts, opinions, comments, and advice

Take it for what it's worth. We are not Disney experts as we have only been on three trips so far, but we have learned a few things along the way. Hopefully somebody will find it interesting if not helpful.
1. Resort choice--I think we have decided we can mark the contemporary off our list. At least for now. It is also a convention center, and was not very cozy or family friendly. We happened to have our trip coincide with the Florida democratic convention, an the hospitality suite was just down the hall from our room. Close enough that the crowd could easily be heard outside our door late at night. It just seemed very corporate and not easy to navigate. We were staying in the garden wing, which is a separate building, and all of the hotel services were on the 4th floor of the main tower. It was a long enough walk to fill up your resort drink mug that you could drink it all and need a refill by the time you made the trip back to the room. Out of the 3 deluxe resorts we have stayed at so far (Polynesian, wilderness lodge, and contemporary), we prefer the wilderness lodge. The theme is great, everything is in the same building and on the first floor. Transportation to and from the parks was just as good/fast as the contemporary, which is also within walking distance of the magic kingdom. It is within walking distance, but we mostly were not into making the walk. We did enough walking every day in the park.
The only thing I could thin I would want to try at the contemporary is staying in a room in the tower with a magic kingdom view. You could see the fireworks from your room every night and be closer to the amenities. Not out of the question for the future.
2. Dining plan--the verdict is still out on whether this saves any money, but it certainly makes dining worry free and more enjoyable because you aren't worried about how much dinner is going to cost. It is paid for in advance. That is also an advantage. You have already Lao for it, so it's not like you have to take a huge unknown chunk of money with you to pay for food. You already know exactly how much it's going to cost to eat the whole trip because you paid for it in advance, and it's done. We did not use all of our snacks, but we cashed in our extra snacks on the way out this morning for several Mickey mouse rice krispie treats. Score!! They are delicious!! We worked out our meal credits just right and use our last two for breakfast this morning.
I will say that the deluxe plan is a lot of food, because you get appetizer, entree, and dessert at every sit down meal, and it's not likely that you will want that at lunch and dinner every day.
Another plus to the deluxe plan is that you CAN book sit down meals three times a day or have counter service (fast food type meals) three times a day. The advantage of this is that you can do a character breakfast and only use one dining credit. We ended up doing 3 character meals and didn't pay extra for it. This made the deluxe plan really worth it for us.
If you do a character breakfast it is a huge buffet, which was really very good at every place we dined. We were not even close to hungry at lunch, so we ended up canceling our sit down reservations for lunch two of those days.
I enjoyed each of the restaurants where we dined, and would go back to any of them. They are:
Liberty tree tavern--MK
Chef mickey's for character breakfast--contemporary
Portabello--downtown Disney--very good. Probably 2nd fav of the whole trip.
Hollywood and vine for character breakfast--Hollywood studios
Sci-fi dine in theater--hollywood studios. Great atmosphere. Cool concept.
Le cellier steakhouse--Epcot. Signature dining experience. Good, but not that impressed--have been there twice now.
Tusker house character breakfast--animal kingdom.
California grill--contemporary resort Signature dining experience. Jared says this is the best food he's had in Disney so far. I was pretty impressed myself. The service was above and beyond. And to top it off we had an unbelievable view of the magic kingdom and fireworks.
The wave--contemporary. Theme is healthy/green restaurant. I enjoyed it very much. Jared not as impressed. I would still go back there.
I guess this has turned into more of a dining at Disney topic..... Next, make reservations!!! If you want to eat somewhere, make reservations. I made our reservations well in advance and still had trouble getting the time we wanted at a couple of places. If we had waited until close to our trip, or once we had arrived, we would have never been able to get a table at any of the places we went.
3. Extra magic hours--verdict is don't do it!! We found that the days the parks had extra magic hours were more busy than days that did not. Translates to longer waits and more people to weave through, so it doesn't do you any good to get there an hour early.
4. Rain at Disney--no problem. You're not there to win a beauty contest. You're there to have fun with your kids and family. Forget about how you look and throw on a poncho or whatever and go ride. We made it to almost every ride in the park that we wanted to do in one morning because nobody else was there. Barring extremely cold weather or torrential downpours, just go have fun. It's just rain. You can get dried off later.
Hmmm. That's all I can think of for now. Here are a few pics from my phone that didn't make it into other posts.