@Latecomer
Both. I certainly think better development out of the gate would have helped her feel more believable, and give weight to future character beats. She always struggled to confront her past because her past was badly written and didn’t connect very well to her subseqent characterisation.
Though I’m loath to compare the two, I have to bring up Starlight. Starlight wanted friends who accepted her and obeyed her, and relied on brainwashing them to force them to confirm to her liking. Her subsequent character development revolved around making friends with oddballs who forced
her to change and grow as a person, and her eventual development led her becoming an advisor to help others make friends and solve their problems in a productive way. Those two goals overlap and complement each other, which helps that sense of organic growth.
Starlight’s villainous motives are… vague. She seems to desire power and conquest, and these extremely generic goals fail to relate to her future persona in anything but the most basic ways. The show defines her redemption as ‘I never realised that friendship could be a good thing!’ which is not exactly unique for the franchise, and once she’s had that realisation there’s nowhere really for it to go.