There's no denying his creative, yet practical, approach was groundbreaking... But he's not been in control for years.
If you look at Chessington's attractions in the context of how they were when they opened you see some great design, simple design. Most of the rides there load on the far side, allowing the queue to serve the purpose of leading up to the attraction following an interesting layout, and allowing the exit to be simple and get people off and out of the way asap. Runnaway Mine Train, Bubbleworks and Dragon Falls especially. There's also the way he would design attractions so that guests could see the loading and minimize confusion, as was the case with Vampire, Bubbleworks and Dragon Falls, leading the queue into the station from a high view.
It's things like that, which whilst now are mostly destroyed by at the time unforeseen issues such as fast track or disabled access, which made the park a functioning, successful, pleasant, stress-free space for both guests and the staff who had to deal with them.
He made sensible, interesting decisions about which attractions to get. The Tussaud's parks had interesting varieties of rides, without neglecting the classic favourite types such as log flumes. Many attractions were not only new to the UK, but some of which were world firsts. Their themes ranging from, again, classic understandable easy Disney ripoff stuff people lapped up to truly weird stuff, uniquely British, uniquely Tussauds.
His ability to look at what the masters were doing at Disney, and transform it for the British audience at a fraction of the cost, was also impressive. Look at the quality and scale of the Spirit of London at Madame Tussauds, or Terror Tomb at Chessington when it had a narrative.
He's also incredibly self critical, human and enthusiastic. The attractions he lead were world class.
His involvement with anything recent is minimal. I don't know how long Candy Holland has been the lead there, but I'm sure I read somewhere she's been involved since at least Oblivion. She's brought with her, in my opinion, better understanding of the current audience they now deal with than what Wardley could possibly have. Wardley's attractions were fantastic for their time, and Holland's are fantastic for now. She has a far harder job I'd say, in a rapidly changing world with greater competition, more restrictive budgets and an increasingly more skeptical audience.
It's very easy to let nostalgia fog things up.
