@Kazapsky
Most of the adult pony fans of older generations were (and still are) women collecting the toys for sentimental reasons and for their value to other collectors. If they had been “in charge” of creating the FiM fandom, then I suspect it would not have become anywhere near as widespread or popular. There would have been a few pictures of huge collections of figurines, but nowhere near as many reaction images, funny captions or pirated episodes. Hell, a lot of those people don’t even like FiM because they think its style is too modern.