I will take oakislander's idea and run with it even more.
This park should ONLY have evening hours. Open at 5pm and close at midnight (maybe 1am on Saturdays in the heart of summer).
I have been a Myrtle Beach regular since the mid-80's and the facts are there. People go to this place for the beach and golf. Husbands take their families, they play golf all day while the wife takes the kids to the ocean. This usually happens every single day of their vacation (whether it's four days or a week). The mini-golf and the seafood buffets don't even open during the day, reason being: no business.
For FMP to succeed maybe they need to follow this similar pattern. Charge a $20-25 entrance fee and have evening hours only. Run a shuttle up and down the main beach road and carry people to and from the park all evening, or call the park from your hotel and arrange a shuttle stop. The City of Myrtle Beach would probably promote this as a way to keep teens from cruising the beach road all night and reducing underage drinking, troublemaking, and even traffic. Offer some package deals to the larger, family-oriented hotels that includes a pre-paid admission to FMP for each family member for 1 or 2 nights worth of entry over the course of their stay (easily figured in to the room rate for a 4-7 night stay. FMP could even get this money whether the vacationers used the tickets or not.) This would also include shuttle transportation to and from each participating hotel. The Pavilion was always considered something to do after the sun went down and that is what lead to it's long life (eventually land values brought on its demise, I guess).
FMP can possibly survive, become a family vacation BENEFIT ("Honey, let's let FMP babysit tonight and we'll do our own thing") and possibly over the long haul, with large ride reinvestments, they can build a reputation as a destination spot all it's own, if that's their true goal.
The fact that they got the place for a song (pun), evening hours only means less operating costs. Throw in some built-in attendance/ticket sales, and they can possibly turn a profit and expand quickly. The only way I can imagine HRP could've survived was if South Carolina passed a casino gambling law and they built a huge on-site hotel and casino. Even then, the theme park wasn't guaranteed to be successful.
Why doesn't anybody see this? Any amount of research into the average Myrtle Beach vacationer should have been able to see this. I guess the original planners had dilusional visions of granduer, or something.