One of the things I think Thorpe's recent investments have been missing is longevity. They seem to have built a lot of stuff that generates short-term buzz, but when you look at their recent investments and ask how it will look ten or twenty years from now, nothing really holds up since Swarm. A big coaster is fun for many years, a big flat ride likewise (Vortex is 18 years old this year and still draws quite a queue, to my knowledge), but a 4D cinema with Angry Birds or an I'm A Celebrity maze doesn't seem like it will have a shelf life of more than five years. And a VR attraction like Derren Brown is doomed to be outdated by technological advances long before it's a decade old, never mind the cultural relevance of its title character. The park has been building a lot of bells and whistles, but no rides that can form a backbone of their lineup in the coming decade.
Then again, I suppose one can look at this from another perspective and ask how many backbone rides they actually need. If they decide that they only want to maintain, say, twenty mechanized attractions, and that's the number they have today, and all of them still have some years left in them, I suppose they can make do short-term stuff for a while. But that means replacing attractions continuously as they reach the end of their lifespan, and some of them were built in pretty quick succession, so they would need to get ready for a similar burst of investment when that replacement time comes.
