Listen, we've all been 20-something hipsters. I'm not saying your piece isn't funny or that it doesn't adopt just the right balance between condescension and admiration. I really, truly, have felt about Disney exactly the way you seem to.
But what you can't realize is that the place changes when you have kids. The fakery, the creepy corporatism ... it all fades into the background and all of a sudden what seems most noteworthy about Disney is the sheer magnitude of the fact that here is a multinational corporation, with multinational resources, wholly dedicated (for profit, admittedly) to the imaginary lives of children. It's a place where a four-year-old can be a real cowboy, or a princess, or visit the frontier, or fly on a baby elephant, or meet Peter Pan. That's what the place is about. You simply haven't seen Disney until you've watched the firework display with your toddler perched on your shoulders.
I'm not saying Disney should be the whole of anyone's existence, and certainly a parent should do many other things to stimulate a child's imagination in a more active way and not just as a spectator. But Disney lets dreams be real, and says that anything is possible. By the time you get to be a 20-something hipster, that message has lost its power. But as foundational material for a child's imaginative worldview and sense of possibility ... well as a parent, all I can say is that I appreciate there is an organization out there doing what they do on the scale they do it, and I'm happy to pay them for it.
