Frankly I completely understand the Equestria Girls hate.  The first couple waves in particular were terrible fashion dolls (molded on tops and ugly ugly ugly skirts).  They are cheap and created to try to lick up the crumbs falling from Monster High's plate.  They are just so lazily made, like it's unbelievable to me that they just molded dolls legs in green or pink or whatnot to give them "tights" instead of of actual cloth tights.  Who cares if their actual, not-able-to-be-removed legs clash with other outfits in the line, right?  They're only FASHION DOLLS where switching clothes is the main mode of play.

But more to the point, ponies have never been fashion dolls and I think that is very freeing.  There usually are clothing sets that either come with the ponies (like G3) or that you can buy separately (like G1), but they're totally optional.  And it's really rare for a girls toy to go "hey, fashion is fine but not caring about it is fine too."  And with G4 specifically, two of the characters are tomboys.  It doesn't make sense for their humanized versions to wear preppy skirts on the daily.  But there they were, wearing them.   One thing I noticed with those prototype(?) G5 "human dolls" is they put Zipp Storm in stylish clothes that a jock girl would actually wear.  But with G4 Equestria Girls, they didn't.

Also the high school setting is so uncreative, boring, and, again, obviously just a desperate attempt to ride Monster High's coattails.  IMO Monster High and Bratz are the only two doll lines that have EVER made the high school setting work.  With Bratz it worked because it subverted Barbie's campy, fantasy vibe (that she had at the time), plus they look like they would gladly push you down a flight of stairs which is a very high school vibe, and with Monster High it worked because the idea of monsters doing something as mundane as going to high school is funny and made for all kinds of silly puns and dark humor, like going to Home Ec class and making Eye Scream Cones out of eyeballs or whatever.  With horses it's like . . . okay.  They were adults as horses who had jobs and saved the world and stuff . . . don't see why they couldn't do that as humans . . .

Also high school is usually an exciting, aspirational place for tweens, but the major MLP market is for young girls (like three to eight) so it isn't even a sound marketing decision imo.  But, once again . . . Monster High was selling like hot cakes.  Why think about your audience when you can just copy Mattel's homework?

Rainbow High is another doll line where I absolutely hate the high school setting.  It doesn't even make sense because the dolls HAVE MAJORS.  But god forbid a toy company even branch out enough to put them in college instead of high school.  Girls are only allowed to fantasize about being in high school, and after they get out of high school . . . I don't know, I guess we are to assume that the earth opens up and swallows every female fashion doll character immediately after they graduate.  Except Barbie. That is actually why Barbie owns so many planes, she needs them to save her from the pit.

Man I miss Jem.

I also don't get why the Baby Ponies were treated like new characters, rather than just the younger version of the pony they resembled. I don't know if all canons did this (the cartoon did, and there's a comic that has the baby ponies being cloned from a mirror), but I find it strange that they made baby versions of the adult ponies, and made them new/different characters (I'll check what the toyline did, but the cartoon could have easily have had flashbacks to when the adult version of whatever baby pony they wanted to market was younger...)

Because mother-daughter sets / play is cute and endearing.   The babies look identical to the moms so that children can immediately identify which baby pony goes with which mom pony.  Also in the 80s Hasbro was all about collectibility, which meant collecting new characters.  I think their feeling was "If a kid already has Pony XYZ, why would they want a new version of her?"  Like, why would Baby Glory being "Glory as a baby" be any more engaging than "Glory had a baby who looks just like her"?  If they're separate characters, you can have Glory nuzzling her baby, putting on her diaper, and feeding Baby Glory her bottle.  If they're the same character that deletes the mother-daughter play and interactions between the toys wouldn't really make sense.

I mean you could make up a time travel plot, but what about when you don't want to have time travel, what about when you just want the ponies to go to a party?

The gimmick of the G1 Sunshine ponies is that their one hair stripe color-changes in the sun, but several of them have the pink hair that fades in the sun.

Maybe Hasbro was just unaware of this?  They probably didn't take their prototypes outside a lot.

The word canon was used in fandom prior to G4 times. I don't know when it first became a thing, but Transformers fans argued about canon when Beast Wars was airing (late 90s).  Or they would argue about the origins of the Constructicons in the G1 cartoon.  In the TF show bible they said "The origins of the Constructicons, who form the giant robot Devastator, are a mystery", so three different writers took that to mean "Oh, I should invent an origin for these guys" and of course all the origins contradict each other.  #1: Megatron built the Constructicons.  #2: The Constructicons built Megatron.  #3: The Constructicons used to be Autobots but Megatron turned them into Decepticons with his Turn-Evil Ray.  Technically all these origins are canon since they were in the show which just goes to show that just because something is canon doesn't mean it has to make sense.

Oh yeah, pony names!  The name "Tootsie" is very confusing to me because no one in the US uses tootsie as a generic term for candy (unlike some states using "Coke" to refer to any soda), it's specifically used for Tootsie Rolls and Tootsie Pops.  And those were named after the company founder's daughter, so it wasn't a generic term in The Old Days either.

Also, her symbol doesn't look like Tootsie Pops.  Usually they are wrapped in a patterned, waxed paper wrapper.  (There are a few different patterns and when I was a kid there was a rumor that if you found the wrapper with a boy shooting a star with an arrow then you could turn it in for a free Tootsie Pop.  As far as I know this rumor was false, ha ha.)  And when you do unwrap Tootsie Pops they're never light pink. They're very dark colors and they have a kind of raised band around them.

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So like.  Why call her that.  Why not "Lollipop" or "Candy"?

I thought they might be from Bright Lights since that episode has a lot of night scenes, but they don't appear to be in that one.

Hasbro didn't lose the rights to G4 ponies or animation, lol.  First, Hasbro would never allow that.  Second, Hasbro made at least two other shows featuring the G4 characters: Pony Life and that CGI variety hour show with Pinkie Pie.

Hasbro never lost the rights to the G1 ponies' likenesses either.  IMO the reason the ponies in Lauren Faust's original pitch (Firefly, G1 Twilight, Surprise, Posey etc) were changed were as follows:

Rainbow Dash and Pinkie Pie were THE most marketed, merchandised ponies from G3 so Hasbro wanted them to continue into G4.  It doesn't matter that they have different personalities than G3;  what matters is during G3 kids were buying more balloons and shirts of RD and Pinkie Pie than of Sparkleworks, Minty, or Sunny Daze.

Fluttershy and Rarity the Unicorn(tm) were both trademarked names from G3.  You'll notice G3 tended to have more elaborate and sort of weird names compared to G1.  Like a lot more "Tink-a-Tink-a-Too" and lot fewer "Bubbles".  IMO part of the reason for this is it's easier to defend the trademark on a name like Tink-a-Tink-a-Too.  If a competitor uses that you KNOW they are copying you and you can take them to court.  This is also why the toys of Mrs. Cake are "Mrs. Dazzle Cake", lol. And why Rarity's full trademark is "Rarity the Unicorn". (This was also the trademark of G3 Rarity.)

G1 Twilight and Firefly are pink and The Pink Slot was already taken up by Pinkie Pie.  With a small main cast, you want each one to have a different signature color, like the Power Rangers, TMNT, the Rescue Bots, etc.  Not for nothing did the TMNT cartoon change the headbands of the turtles, which were ALL red in their initial comics.

Applejack was the lone survivor, long live Applejack.

I like the G5 ponies.  IMO they have a lot more nuance to their personalities than previous gens, including G4.  Not that lack of nuance is necessarily a problem for cartoon characters, like Donald Duck doesn't have any nuance either and I love him, but I do find it a refreshing change.  G5 reminds me of Transformers Prime, in that something about the way they're written makes me believe they had histories and lives and emotions before we were introduced to them, which is not something I feel about a lot of cartoons.  (Though TFP does it better than G5 MLP.)

Oh, incidentally I wasn't complaining about the G4 ponies being dead, I actually find it knee-slapping funny.  It's just so unusual for a girls property.  Like imagine if during the 1986 MLP movie Megan had said "Hey where are Firefly and Bow Tie?" and Wind Whistler had said "Time moves differently here, let me take you to their GRAVESTONES."  (Honestly . . . I wouldn't hate it. I'm peeved that they just yeeted Firefly etc into the void.)

I think Hasbro will start moving to shorter generations, like Transformers (where most gens last no more than three years), but script them out more than with G1 through G4.  Watching G5, it's interesting how purposeful it is.  Like Misty's plotline is baked into the entire season, from reluctant villain to heelturn to main cast member.  The writers don't always hit the right balance with the episodes,  some of them are not that interesting because the non-Misty portions are kind of space-fillers, but the overall concept is interesting and imo the episodes pick up in quality as soon as Misty is added to the main cast.

Anyway, back to baffling decisions . . . The Glow 'n Show ponies only had four ponies in the set and TWO of them are orange.  Same for the Baby Sparkle ponies set.  If they were bigger sets I would find this less weird. 

There are no G1 Petite pony unicorns.  Why?  They could have molded the horn to be flush with the hair sculpt, doesn't seem that hard.

There aren't any G3 baby unicorns either.  Again, why?  Rarity is literally a baby unicorn in G3 but her toy is an adult.

this reminds me of the similar argument for clothes tbh. like, natural materials are great and renewable, but a lot of them just don't last very well, so it's about finding a balance with synthetic fibres which, yes, they're overglorified plastic, but you only have to create the emissions of making them once, and they very well may last several decades/generations. i think it's the same for toys. plastic isn't as terrible and evil as people say if they're being made to last (ie look how well g2s are still doing!), but they're just not anymore 

Yeah, but with clothes there's also the question of fashion.  Most people are not going to wear bell bottoms from the 70s, the wide-shouldered women's power suits of the 80s, or the godawful fashions of the early 2000s in the modern day regardless of how well the clothing are made in a technical sense.  Make them of natural fibers and let them decay, I don't want to look at them lol.

Part of it isn't Hasbro, but a societal shift where kids get out of toys faster and instead do online stuff.  I was setting up at a toy show and this little girl who was 8 or 9 (a kid of one of the other vendors) looked at my booth and said "You have cool stuff!"  Then she said, "I'm not buying anything at the toy show, though. I'm saving up all my money for Roblox."

Roblox do have play value, my understanding is they're kind of like online Legos? So, yeah, that's still imaginative play.  But still . . . dang . . .

But yeah, investing money into quality toys is a better long term strategy, since the kids playing with toys will someday grow up and you want them to be nostalgic about your company in general and the toy in particular.  G4's increasingly crappy hair was soooo frustrating to me.  G5 is a mixed bag, the 6" figures (like the Target exclusive set) have incredible hair but some of the smaller brushables have bad hair.  Personally I don't mind the molded hair, but I do prefer that a pony either have all molded hair or all brushable.

A baffling (but welcome) Hasbro decision was dropping the Mane Six for G5.  They didn't even go with the low-hanging fruit of "The new ponies are the children of the Mane Six," instead it's this grim dystopian future where the Mane Six failed and are all presumably dead.  It's sooo funny and probably my favorite way they could possibly have kept a connection to G4.  Anyway, the surprising part is that they would sideline the Mane Six since Hasbro has been trying to establish a core cast of widely recognizable ponies for SO long (since MLP Tales) and had finally achieved it.  Through cultural osmosis, even people who weren't into ponies knew names like "Fluttershy" and "Twilight Sparkle".  The early leaked concept art for G5 showed exactly what I expected:  the same six ponies, rebooted in a new universe with some minor cosmetic changes.  But then Hasbro punted them to the side in favor of a new cast. 

I can only speculate that Hasbro wanted to leave the whole "brony" thing behind them and thought the best way to do this was to pivot away from the G4 cast.  And it worked, most bronies seem to hate (or at least be annoyed by) G5.  This makes me even more enthusiastic about the new generation, lol.