Thrond

In general I just found it funny and charming on a fairly regular basis, and even saw merit in most of the sloppier episodes, which was a lot harder to enjoy in season 7 when the morals where being shoved aggressively into my face.

I pin down some of the more moral-centric routes of the writers in season 7 (I personally never thought it was that egregious, save for a few outliers such as 'All Bottled Up' and 'Forever Filly') on the inexperience of the writers at the time. While I did enjoy some of the minor stylistic quirks season 7's writing team added (such as the door gag in 'Parental Glideance', although that was definitely one of the better episodes of the first half), there was the sense that many of them were inexperienced at writing for a show like FiM, resulting in the incessant thematic 'reminders' several episodes gave us - it almost comes off like the writers reaffirming their own abilities to an extent. Although the original drafts could have been entirely different, but honestly, we have so little information on how episodes are produced post-S2 that I could be either correct or wildly inaccurate here.

There are a few reasons why season 7 didn't work for me, but more often than not I frankly found it kinda dull. I also felt that way about season 5, which is apparently the most popular season on this board, so make of that what you will.