Epic Failure...lines, waiting, lines & sold out shows

This was my husband and I's 5th cruise (3rd with NCL), but our 1st family trip & "big ship" and we were severely underwhelmed with what it had to offer.  This ship had double the occupancy of the cruise ships we had sailed prior, so we were shocked to find the dining room & entertainment spaces to still be the same size.  The 1st few days we ate all our meals at the buffet (easier with our 3 & 4yr olds), but after tiring of having to search for an available table and wait in line at the buffet every time we were ready to venture out into the sit down restaurants.  Well, apparently NCL's motto of "freestyle cruising" doesn't apply to this ship because we soon were hit with the realization that the dining rooms are not come one come all, but you now have to make a reservation and if you haven't decided before noon where and what time you are going to eat then you have to settle for the buffet because the sit down restaurants are booked solid til 9:30pm!  We ended up waiting in line at the buffet all week.  We were equally disappointed with the same change to the entertainment.  Most shows required getting tickets for and since we weren't aware of this until a few days into the cruise we were out of luck, because all free shows were already booked for the remainder of the cruise!!  The free entertainment aboard also only had 1 showing instead of the customary 2 on every other ship we've sailed (and again double to occupancy but the same size space) it's not surprising how fast everything sold out, but if your selling freestyle cruising I should not have to plan everything so far in advance.  You have to be 7 to bowl and it cost $7.50 per person, why the age requirement?  They had splash golf, but the water was off the entire cruise after the 1st night with no explanation of why, so it was just a sub-par mini golf. We asked several employees how to get to the beach in Tortola and everyone said I don't know (nobody explained that this was the ships 1st time sailing there, we found that out from our Taxi driver).  It is possible it was mentioned on the loud speaker, but we wouldn't know because we could never hear it.  On prior cruises we would just open our stateroom door and could hear from the hallway, but that wasn't the case here.  The smoking area was on the back of the ship, which would make sense, except that you have to walk through it to get the the sports courts. This ship also felt very segmented, you couldn't use any elevators to go everywhere and the map of the ship by the elevators didn't explain which elevators lead to what, so we often found ourselves having to backtrack and since this ship also had the standard amount of elevators that was another thing we ended up standing around and waiting for.  

The cruise wasn't all bad.  The ship looked very nice inside and out, and my favorite thing was that the starboard and port sides had different color carpets & elevators so you didn't have to get confused.  The pool area was great (although a second bar area would have been nice), the ports of call were beautiful, and our balcony was very spacious.  They had a great system that made finding your cruise photos so easy!  The splash academy was great and constantly had new activities, but I wished they had more events for the whole family (since parents aren't allowed in the splash academy and we couldn't get my son to stay) We had a good time, but after a 5 year hiatus from cruising we were upset that this was what we had to settle for.  I would not recommend this cruise ship, it's not up to the same caliber as the others.  We have learned that for NCL anyways, bigger does not mean better.