I am mostly put off by German dubs. I am more comfortable listening to the original, even if it's a dub itself like with MLPFiM. Some German dubs are in parts so infamously horrible that they should never have been done (Futurama had some idiotic translations), and with the above video you show something worth mentioning: It seems to me that there are in fact very few German voice actors, but most are just 'dubbers'. They can't really create new, different voices, so they merely change their intonation, making it sound artificial especially in animated series. This in my perception is what's adding some of the harshness of the voices.

I'm hearing the same voices over and over when watching various German dubbed material (rarely doing that these days though).

What generally bugs me about translation is that often things are translated in an unnecessarily complicated for altering way where the smoothest translation would be much more true to the original. This also applies to books! There's is no need for lip-synching in books, yet many book translations I came across are actually re-interpretations; the translator adding their own personal style, in effect rewriting the whole style of the book. (No big surprise - many book translators are authors themselves. Probably difficult for some to get their own stuff out of the way.)

As hinted at, I make a difference between dubbing and voice acting, and the English MLP dub crew are definitely being actors. I think I'm picking up the attitude German voice actors have towards their job in their voices. "These are animated magical ponies for little girls, we have to make them sound that way." It's the same twisted mindset that believes children need to be served crappy and simplisic stuff, treating them like they're dumb. (They're not. They'll happily rise to challenges.)

I didn't do THAT many comparisons, but I remember one of many examples of what often happens in TV/movie dubs: Emphasis is messed up. It's like they don't know the whole context of what they're saying. They put the emphasis on the wrong parts of words. Fast&Furious - Vin Diesel's character. German dub totally didn't comvey his personality sometimes. I might not be skilled at lipsynching and such, but when watching some German dubs, I'm speaking my own lines in my head, re-adding the real acting part of the original.

I'd like to mention that there's one German dub that's actually done excellently, at least as good if not better than the original: Star Wars (the old movies). That's because the actors were mostly B ranking, while the dubbing was done by veteran professionals.

Oh and I remember another funny/sad anecdote:

It seems there's also a lack of German voices with a very deep tone, so it might happen that the original has a deeper voice than the dub. But sometimes it gets extreme. I remember one of the Wing Commander games where a black guy with a very deep voice in the original has one of the highest and most raspy voices you could imagine. And then... when there actually IS a German voice with a deep tone, it's not unlikely they'll dub a character that originally has a very HIGH pitched voice. It's really madness sometimes.

Also, there was a funny incident with Marge from The Simpsons. She got a new German voice, and from an actual VA I'd say, and she did a relatively good job emulating her English voice, and that caused a storm of outrage and disgust, because Marge's English voice isn't really beautiful, but the old German one was. German viewers had gotten so used to the first German voice that the authentic VA sounded like an insult.