I am not surprised at all that Small World will be completely overhauled - in all the times I've been to DLRP (2011 onwards) I've never seen it where every doll is working as they should be. Plenty of dolls with stuck/twitching mouths or arms for example. It was repainted and cleaned for the 20th anniversary, but still no broken dolls were fixed.
Now that Disney corp have taken over, they will simply not allow this for the 25th anniversary, as you can tell by many of the comments in recent interviews. I imagine that all the motors and recievers in the audio animatronics will be simply replaced - easily affordable for them (assuming that they are identical to the Florida and California mechanisms), whereas before the costs and paperwork etc involved would have been difficult for DLRP to manage themselves. This seems to be slowly happening (one at a time) for figures in Star Tours and Phantom Manor, which get removed, then reappear a week later moving far smoother, but obviously IASW is a far bigger job, and the water makes it more akward. I imagine a similar overhaul of Pirates may happen, though I didn't notice many problems with it in our last trip (unless the skelleton pirates are meant to move - not a single one has ever moved when I've ridden it).
