[sha9]

So I added it up and it cost $989.94 for food for two of us for a week doing basically what we wanted. We had a budget obviously but it was pretty decent so we didn't second guess what we were eating. I just wanted to see if paying for food would be better for us than having DDP, free or paid for. DDP would have cost us £699 and with an exchange rate of $1.31 to the £ (which is what my credit card gave us) we spent £755. So there's the answer. There was food bought that we couldn't have got on DDP such as the Coke stuff ($17.04) and the non-Disney stuff however we probably wouldn't have eaten at those restaurants had we had DDP.
Credit wise we would have needed:

16 TS credits (would have had 14)
8 QS credits or 14 QS (would have had 14)
47 snacks or 29 (would have had 28!)

So had we had DDP we'd have had to pay for 2 meals which doesn't include the day we ate at Fresh and Sharks so we'd have had to pay for those meals too. We'd also have had to do a bit of planning to use QS credits for snacks. We'd have had several desserts we didn't really want.

So overall I think we'd have spent the same money. We'd have used up all our TS credits for sure and by the looks of things our snacks too!

So the verdict? There's a freedom not being tied to credits and it allowed us to eat at a couple of places we wouldn't have normally. However, DDP is great and it's nice to totally relax about food and not worry about going somewhere that a steak costs you $54. Overall, I'd rather have DDP and given that the room discount amounted to £472 over the week we would always choose DDP over a room discount. I look forward to having it free again next year and using lots of snack credits on Ample Hills ice cream!