I tend to separate Disney Movies from the Disney Industrial ComplexTM. Movies vary between and within studios - Brave, Frozen, Rapunzel, Princess and the Frog, Mulan... all pretty decent female leads (although the heteronormativity gets annoying after a while). On the other hand, Dreamworks didn't have a female lead of any sort, good or bad, until 2009's Monsters vs. Aliens. So I take movies on a film-by-film basis without really giving much attention to what studio they come from.
But the branding nonsense is unconscionable. My son is very much in the "Must own all the things my classmates do" age bracket, and while he knows the answer is going to be no, he still makes his case on a regular basis. What's ridiculous to me is the number of things that are the exact same as something we either already own, or could do for free. For instance, I could spend $19.99 on a Disney Pictionary game... or we could just grab a pad of paper (or better yet, open a drawing app on my Kindle) and play for essentially free. Same thing with bubbles. $0.05 pays for all the soap and water a child could possibly need to blow bubbles to their heart's content for the all-of 10 minutes it will hold their attention, but for some reason he thinks it would be better better if the bubbles come in a bottle shaped like Elsa, and are poured into a Disney Princess or Cars bubble machine while the he waves an Ariel bubble wand over his head.
I'm also generally annoyed by the way the branding has spilled over into the selling of the movies. Our approach to movies is to watch them on Netflix whenever possible. Failing that, we'll wait for them to come down in price to the point that we can buy the digital copy for super cheap. Failing that, we'll buy the DVD used and use Vudu to get the digital copy. Disney's classic movies are not available on Netflix, their digital copies never come down in price, and they won't allow disc-to-digital. Screw that noise.