My thoughts are: it’s not really free, you have to pay rack rate for your room. And now with the devaluation of the DDP at moderates to only QS, even less of a deal. Free DDP at deluxe resorts has never been a deal for us.
When we first weaned ourself off the DDP, I took what the cost of the DDP was and put it on a gift card and used that for all dining. So it was like having the food pre paid, just tap the card.
What I found was we had a lot of cash left on the card at the end of trip just eating as we like, and ate well. Like others, I’m happy with water at meals, we aren’t soda drinkers, and don’t want a dessert after lunch and dinner plus daily snack. We ended up buying a bunch of wrapped treats our last day to take home just to use up all the snack credits.
Our first few trips we used the DDP but that was back when appie and tip was included in plan and it was a reasonable cost. As the cost kept rising and value of plan decreased we just stopped using it.
I still use a gift card loaded with what I figure we’ll spend on dining and use that card just for dining. It’s still prepaid as I know what we spend on food and have saved that amount in our budget.