Possible Disneyland trip

So this really great thing happened:

Benn and I decided that since my parents were such good sports about going to my favorite place for my birthday this year that we would take a cruise (their preferred vacation) with them next year to celebrate their 60th birthdays. We talked about what cruise line everyone wanted to do and what destination. We had considered Northern Europe and we looked at a few DCL cruises and that was't really working out. We would like to do Alaska and New England, but mom and dad have done both of those. California was a big draw for us because of possible coupling with Disneyland, but it did not look promising for that time frame. Their birthdays are March 17 and April 1 and we were having trouble finding an itinerary during that time frame that everyone liked in a price range where everyone was happy.

So this past weekend, my mom called me very excitedly that she had found a great itinerary on Princess Cruise Line leaving from Los Angeles on March 28, stopping in San Francisco, Santa Barbara, San Diego, and Ensenada MX before returning to LA on April 4. Perfect!!! We haven't booked it yet, but my tentative plan is to arrive in LA as early as possible on Wednesday, March 25, get transportation to Disneyland, and to the 2:30 Walk in Walt's Footstep's Tour. We'll stay in Anaheim (probably at a good neighbor hotel because GC is a boatload of DVC points and it seems to be difficult to book--plus we'll only have 22 points left after our "let's see how many times we can go to Disney" year, so we'll have to borrow 2016 points) on Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday nights. We'll do Disneyland one day and DCA the other day. On Saturday morning, we'll spend a little bit of time at Downtown Disney before catching a shuttle to the cruise terminal.

My question to my WDWFG friends:

This will be our first ever Disneyland trip and it will probably be a while before we go back. This is the end of Spring Break season and the week before Easter and Touring Plans is predicting overall crowd levels ranging from 6-8 with per park crowds of 6.4-7.8 at Disneyland. (DCA doesn't seem to be an issue--level 1.2 on our most likely day there.) When I see those kinds of crowd predictions at WDW, you'll find me hanging out at EPCOT. Has anyone been to Disneyland when it's "crowded" and how overwhelming is it? If we skip Disneyland this time, we will probably go back to SoCal in a year or two. If I take 3 days at Disneyland now, it might be 5 years or more before we hit the west coast again. I so desperately want to see it and I love that we can do Disneyland and the cruise on the same flight, but I know how tricky crowd management is at MK and that was built in 1971. How is crowd management in the park that was built in 1955??