“What have you been up to?”
“Oh, you know…trying to take over the world?”
Nope. She never tried to take over the world.
The whole point of her villainy is that it was petty.
The whole point of her running that village is that it only works on a small scale for especially depressed ponies who blame their life problems on their cutie marks, and even she knows it.
My idea is that Our Town was a highly inefficient village that couldn’t even produce enough crops to survive, and secretly performed magical assistance on that and many other aspects of life with your raw amount of magical energy, to appease the few dozen townspeople and make them believe that a productive society can exist with nothing but talentless blank flanks.
Eventually, she stopped recruiting new people into the village because even she has an upper limit to how much she can pick up their slack.
All that ranting about “EQUALITY!” during The Cutie Re-Mark was her lying out loud because it would sound better than explaining Twilight the truth of her motives for choosing a lifestyle in which she is the leader of a flock that adores her without having to out in the actual effort of learning much of anything about them, of ever getting particularly personal with anyone.
She personally doesn’t resent having a cutie mark herself. Even is there really was a Staff of Sameness with actual magical power, she never would use it on herself.
The part about “I CREATED HARMONY!” is more what she is about. Removing cutie marks to create Equality is just a means to achieve it.
One theory I have is that she believes that perhaps only one in forty or so ponies should have cutie marks, all of which must be unicorns whose talent is raw magical power, to compensate for the markless pleb ponies being mediocre at everything. So basically, she’d be a self-sacrificial feudal-lord of sorts who would exert a lot of magical-physical effort to keep the dumbass lemming flock alive and not starve to death.
She may have entertained the idea of getting Twilight Sparkle to start a neighboring village, given that even SG has upper magical limits to how much she can secretly assist a given number of ponies in a group.
Slightly better for her backstory to be about her being butthurt about someone else getting a cutie mark, ANY cutie mark, and them being shipped off to somewhere else (a school for magically gifted unicorns) as a result, instead of her getting a cutie mark and it being different from her friend resulting in different interests resulting in conflict”.
Not only that, but her cutie mark ended up being about magic and basically the same thing that Sunburst got. Well, we don’t know how she got it, and what pony peers were in her life at the time.
This is the reason why her equality philosophy is so flimsy and vague, and how she is somehow converted away from it.
In “Our Town”, she was basically a Great and Powerful Trixie who can never be upstaged because no one knew that she was magically gifted therefore no one could be a better leader or better pony at having magic as a talent.
Ironically, having different cutie marks would be the least offensive to her, at least, if no one else had a general magic cutie mark.
The whole point of forming Our Town was so that she’d never have to have a rivalry with another magically-powerful unicorn and get triggered from remembering Starburst leaving her.
