@Zenitheus  
While it was big, it would’ve been bigger if they stayed. They kept bringing forth new ideas, only to give up on it. Still, Hasbro should’ve hired new writers who had significant experience.

@vgmaster9  
Undeniably. The departure of the original staff was a critical blow to the quality of later seasons. They understood fully well the core of the show - six ponies being friends. And they handled it, as well as the episodes they wrote, with care. But changes of staff, especially for a long-running series like this are bound to happen. The old guard gets tired, and the ones to take their place have no incentive to outdo their predecessors. After all, the show was already big when they left, so why bother learning what it made it great?
 
 
Is it any wonder we got all these Twilight Snapple episodes when Lesson Zero was meant to be a one-time joke exaggerating Twilight’s personality?

@Zenitheus  
To me the root of the problem was the departure of longtime writers like Megan McCarthy, M.A. Larson, Amy Keating Rogers, etc after season 5. Had they stayed, the seasons afterward would’ve been way better.

@vgmaster9  
It seems to be a combination of both. Like I said, the landscape for web generated content now is vastly more centralized than it used to be back in 2011. The dynamics of growing one’s page/channel changed, and so did the culture of making content. The other reason is that Friendship is Magic wasn’t like any other cartoon at the time it came out. Avatar: The Last Airbender had ended, the full effects of the Great Recession were being felt, and thus, barely any good cartoons were being made. It was a bleak time, but then, all of a sudden, you had this beautiful looking show with a lot of personality set in an expansive fantasy world based on a franchise that was traditionally very rigid in design.
 
A show with a massive amount of characters and a setting like Equestria was bound to attract a lot of intrigue and wonder, especially since the characters weren’t humans, but colorful equines and other fantastic creatures. A lot of early fans came for those aspects of the show and were hopeful to see the direction it would take with all the potential it had, leading to a lot of headcanon, intricate AUs, and other fan works that expanded upon what the show presented in trace amounts. Fanworks like Equestria-Prevails’ illustrations, the Pony POV series, and even ones like Fallout: Equestria that don’t do so directly, rode upon the wave of enthusiasm the fandom had. But now that everyone’s seen the direction it did take, with a lot of unsavory creative decisions, fans became disappointed and eventually moved onto other works to find the level of depth they thought FIM couldn’t deliver, which included a lot of the fandom’s best creators, and the fandom’s been hemorrhaging fans ever since.

@Zenitheus  
Question is, what caused the fandom to be less creative late? Is it that they’re out of ideas, or have the recent seasons given the fandom less to work with?

@vgmaster9  
It certainly was a phase to a lot of former fans. It’s undeniable it’s not as massive as it used to be back in 2011 or 2012, when FIM was a massive cultural phenomenon. Back then, MLP fan creators tended to be more ambitious with their crafts and incorporated a multitude of styles, not only in digital illustration, but also animation, fan fiction, music, comics, collabs, OCs and much more, It was also a time when one could easily grow a channel on YouTube, and there wasn’t this narcissistic mentality in online art communities of accepting ugliness.
 
As long as the fandom still produces quality content and has material to work with, it should last for a while. That being said, current MLP fan works don’t seem to have the same spark as the old ones do. Sure, you can still find talented fan creators making great content, but does a contemporary fan work like Space Ponyos invoke the same kind of ambition and intrigue as these?
 
 
 
 
 
 

 
Even Equestria-Prevails’ earlier work was far more interesting than his last mlp-related piece.

@Zenitheus  
It’s truly upsetting. It really makes me wonder if this fandom is nothing more than just a phase. Nothing depresses me more when an artist in the fandom makes tons of amazing MLP art, only for them to suddenly abandon it.

One of my favorite pony artists. It’s a shame that he isn’t doing it as much as he used to and has mostly moved onto Undertale and Night in The Woods bleh.