Disney is not concerned with 'perceptions' of the economy, as long as they are making billions quarterly as a company. As long as that happens, ticket prices will never decline. Beyond that, they will implement more local discounts before they ever actually lower the regular admission prices. To my knowledge, lowering the regular admission price (not as part of any special promo or discount deal) has never happened in Disneyland history.
ANY sort of park-hoppers only move also faces the backlash of guest perception that now Disney is 'forcing' guests to pay for admission to a park that guests weren't interested in, regardless of their length of stay. Since the vast majority of Disneyland attendance is within a reasonable driving distance, this would be still another black eye.
Bottom line, combining the two parks into one flies directly in the face of why DCA was created in the first place, it flies in the face of every single effort made in DCA's direction in the last few years and flies in the face in the efforts made with the billon-dollar renovation plan. It causes so many problems and gives Disney so many public black eyes that it would be a better idea just to bulldoze DCA entirely, rebuild the parking lot, and just forget DCA ever happened. They approved and announced a billion or so reasons why that's also not going to happen.
-- PMM
