It’s cute how bronies suddenly develop discretion when they have something to get mad about. Fine, let me expand that poor summary into a grand pontification.
What you have to understand is that there have been at least three distinct and separate fandoms for FiM, because 1. nine years is a longass time and 2. the show has changed writing teams twice and thus dramatically changed the show twice. This leads to many old fans leaving because they don’t like the new direction, and many new fans coming in because they do. Consequently, these different “join dates” have completely different perspectives on the show.
The eras I personally divide the show’s fandom into, based on these changes, are:
- Classic: S1~S3
- Larson: S4~S5
- Haber: S6~S9
Season 3 was widely considered the worst season until the beginning of the Haber era, at which point the Larson-Haber wars started and more people appeared who openly hated S4-S5. (Spite is always a factor in popularity polls, mind you.)
Everybody was quite vocal about how bad S3 sucked, at the time.
Season 3’s problems were mostly because, as per the above, it was the first time a really drastic change in staff occurred. Worse still, the change was very abrupt: Faust and Renzetti had left the show on sour terms, and they were still scrambling to establish order while making it. So, the whole thing is a little sloppy. Once they got to Season 4, the new order had been more or less established and the quality picked up a bit.
The biggest letdown was how crappy the villain was. One of the writers or another publicly apologized on Twitter and the team swept Sombra under the rug. Nobody expected him to come back.
Also, Season 3 marks the first time that continuity is given particular attention. With the obvious exception of the pilot, S1 and S2 were designed such that the episodes could be in any order… but of course, any scene where Twilight doesn’t have wings must take place before scenes where she does. This increasing focus on continuity led to an overarching story and more frequent drama of varying quality.
Because of the negativity, the team was wary of invoking Season 3, at least by name. Obviously some things established in it still had to be or should’ve been followed through such as “Twilight has wings lul” and “Discord is a good guy lul” and the Equestria Games arc. Naturally, this meant that some negativity over Season 3 continued after Season 3.
But, all the same, many fans were unhappy with these changes, many fans left, and a bunch of new people whose tastes were more in line with this content came in.
This would happen again once Josh Haber took over.
The point is that Season 3 sucked, everyone knew it, and nobody is going to gaslight me into thinking that the hate over it never happened by chasing butterflies and nitpicking details.