One person's perfect is another person's "barely tolerable" when it comes to how something is kept up.
The bottom line is that parks, like so many other things in life, are pyramid schemes.
The guys that started the investment made a *ton* of money (and it was a gamble!) , and they retired out with their stocks and others came in and made *almost* as much, and put in a little for maintenence, then the next group came in...
until the park was no longer cutting edge and couldn't make back the money put into it.
Six Flags had some management decisions over the last 25 years that I thought were *very* stupid ( they bought several parks just to try and monopolize an area, expanded faster than their cash flow for upkeep and repairs, and had some of the WORST advertising campaigns I have ever seen in Northern California all through the 90's....if they advertised at all some seasons!).
Magic Mountain was the end all be all of roller coaster parks when it opened-- the antithesis of Disney, a place for wild teens to really RIDE.... as opposed to the family theme Disney with most rides geared to adults and not as edgy.
Disney caught up.... Thunder Mtn., Space Mtn., Splash Mtn. (does anyone sense a name theme here?) and hung on fast- but the push for "bigger and faster" was short lived- 15 years or so.
Lets face it, Disney is unique in a lot of ways, including their financial base.
It does kill me to see parks close- old ones, kiddie ones, big ones. They are each a part of our history, a living museum to someone and their dream of sharing scares and joy. But we cannot preserve them like flowers in a book or collectable pins.
Like mansions in some elderly neighborhood where the land prices skyrocketed and gentrification set in, the parks will become housing tracts, malls, shopping centers, and freeway off ramps.
:comfort
They will become like the hanging gardens of Babylon- magical stories of long ago, repeated by people that never saw the places when they thrived in the magical age of amusement parks.