You people say the show is getting stale?
Possibly, but for different reasons, it isn’t characters, well, it is partially. But they are making a movie as well right now, and they won’t pay too much attention to the show, allowing crap like Flurry Heart to fall through the cracks.
It’s like SpongeBob, during the production of its second movie, it halted the production of its series to work on what was a successful movie.
It is also the case for the video game NASCAR Heat 2, where the predecessor was horrible. So the bar was set low, but when screenshots for the game came out, and gameplay was seen, the bar was high.
Maybe this is what MLP was doing: S1 - S4 were raising the bar, with controversy along the way, then purposely dropped the bar for S5 - S7 so they could raise the bar AGAIN for the movie.