I personally don’t listen to him/ his podcast. I’m just communicating what I’ve been told by people who have some connection to
the project. I’ve been told that Disney is genuinely struggling finding people to work on these projects because they have so many going on at once (and continuing to add more) and the recruitment process is relatively rigorous.
The issue with budgets in major companies like Disney is that they aren’t flexible. They can’t just pay recruit new people and pay them more money, because Disney has to consider how that factors in with the previous workers. If everyone is making roughly 14.78 an hour and you suddenly bump pay up to 17.00 an hour you’ve just bumped your labor budget up 14% and accounting will have a coronary, especially when, to accounting, it’s an unnecessary cost. That doesn’t even bring up the union (which to my knowledge is still involved in projects), which throws the idea of working around the clock to get the project done out of the realm of possibility (I believe that’s why it took so long to get Pandora out as the attractions were in test and adjust in early June of 2016, I believe there was a sundown rule.) There are a lot of project management issues within Disney in general, but supply of labor is genuinely a problem at the moment.
In addition, Disney is unwilling because while MMRR will be an enjoyable attraction, it lacks a dedicated revenue stream. It’s purely a sunk cost that will have no actual return so going over budget on a project like this is a much bigger sin than going over budget on something like GE whose merch sales will be unlike anything we’ve seen on property.