Im not sure what the "obvious budget cuts" are in the hub or the rest of the park, apart from the observatory themed restaurant and the food place thats still not ready. The cuts we know about were the monsters show being swapped for a coaster and them either not having a good idea for Potter land 2nd ride or not having the budget worthy of its scale - but all signs pointing towards that being solved now.
If you compare opening day line ups to UBR , Epic has 3 less attractions/rides. Everything else was always going to be phase 2 - the difference is UBR has no sign of additions and seems like were getting multiple expansions happening ASAP for epic
Im not saying people arent having a crappy day at Epic right now, nor saying that CP is perfect. but the biggest issue is the fact that Monsters Unchained (and seemingly DK albeit with terrible throughput by design) is the only ride that is operating even close to its actual OHRC. When I compiled the ride data, Potter Monsters and Stardust were the three biggest lifters, yet two of those are barely scraping half the capacity atm. There is no reason 2 Mack LSMs shouldnt be hitting at least 2,600 between them for example.
The whole park is in a capacity deficit of ~5000 ride spaces/hour across 13 rides and 2 shows and that doesn't even take into account downtime, that's a calculation based on everything running (at its currently slow pace) for a full hour. I think if people had lesser waits they wouldn't be looking for things to do in the hub. this park was never meant to be stand alone park it was meant to compliment the other two but until they can get away from these capacity deficiencies its gonna continue to suck. They have until January to begin to solve it as the 7/14-day ticket limitations are lifted and will put more people in the park