Well, I never said the money explanation was a
good excuse.
You're right; it's not.
As for the money excuse being something that couldn't possibly matter to Disney, you might want to visit Disneyland's
Tower of Terror or compare Anaheim's
The Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh with WDW's, or visit the
Walt Disney Studios Park in Paris before you question the likelihood of Disney making a disappointing product just to save money.
(Even Mr. E thought that Anaheim's Tower of Terror was hugely disappointing, and had to be reminded by an opening-crew Imagineer that it was his flunky, Paul Pressler, who cut the budget. )
But I can speak to a few of your specific points:
First, the WDW-logo buses are non-polluting, because they run exclusively on CNG and their engines exhaust clean water vapor. So cutting the buses won't impact pollution much. In fact, one study done by the Reedy Creek Improvement District (aka Disney) indicated that the bus system is
less polluting than the monorails because coal is burned to generate the monorail's electricity.
Second, I picked the Celebration example because (a) I think you can make a strong argument that Celebration--which is probably as close to Walt Disney's
REAL idea of EPCOT as we're ever going to see--is an obvious candidate for connection to the theme parks; and (b) the golf club was the first street address that I could remember when I was using MapQuest to get the distance from the EPCOT Center monorail station to "somewhere else on property."
(As an aside, I would agree with you that most people who GO to WDW go for the parks, but some of the people who LIVE at WDW (Celebration) certainly live there because of the golf facilities.)
Third, don't think for a fraction of a second that the monorail system is inexpensive to maintain, to operate (think "electric bill from hell"), or to train.
Fourth, not all of the buses labeled as "WDW Buses" in the "WDW Transportation System" are actually owned or operated by Disney, nor is their passenger insurance paid for by Disney. Ask any Disneyland Cast Member with some seniority the economic benefit of not having to carry the passenger insurance on "Disney" buses. Contrastingly, the monorails are bankrolled by Disney all the way.
Anyway, enough of this. The point I think that's the most salient is
*not* that Disney can't afford to expand the monorail system.
The point is that in order to keep overall corporate profits high enough to keep the corporate stock price where the corporate executives want it, Disney can only spend a certain amount annually of the tens of billions of dollars in cash that it already has in the bank, on-hand. Once they determine what that amount is, the question turns on
how those dollars will be spent.
