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@Trickquestion  
Also, an immensely powerful dark lord being destroyed in the seat of their power is hardly something FiM came up with.
 
You might want to think about that. A bad guy getting trashed in his hideout isn’t odd, but the issue here is how badly he was beaten.
 
The sisters neither used an external power boost, nor did they exploit a special weakness. Sombra, by contrast, had control over both the Crystal Heart, and the advantages granted by his crystal constructs. Not only did those things not help him against the sisters, but everything that we’ve seen about that incident implies that he didn’t even put up much of a fight.
 
Frodo, by contrast, had Sauron’s heart-as-a-ring, and still had to sneak around while his allies made a distraction. Spider-Man invading Doc Ock’s secret laboratory means dodging traps and fighting robots. Mario tosses Bowser into lava, but he probably died a thousand times on the way.
 
Not so much when the Royal Sisters zapped King Sombra.

@QueenCold  
That wasn’t performed by any single unicorn, and we have no idea how many it took then, compared to how many it would take now. We can’t compare it, because only one group did it.
 
That’s a societal difference, rather than a power difference. You might as well point to speaking a dead language to claim that an older group is smarter, or claiming that building the pyramids by hand instead of using construction equipment made a society more powerful.
 
From what we know, magic relies on knowledge and intelligence. Since modern Equestria has had more time to research magic and improve spells, they would seem to have a very important advantage, even if most unicorns no longer study magic themselves. Actually, we don’t even know how many of the ancient unicorns studied magic, so we don’t know if they had a more trained population.
 
Turning Day and Night seems to be everyone tier magic, along with levitation. Since everyone was able to do it, it probably wasn’t that complicated a magic.
 
Sidenote: I don’t have an objection to modern or ancient unicorn being more powerful, I’m just looking for a proper argument either way.

@Sjogre  
Alternatively, he wrangled a small number of dragons into his laboratory, experimented on them, and then when he was destroyed, the dragons escaped and wandered aimlessly, and eventually outcompeted the natural dragons due to their enhanced power.
 
Also, an immensely powerful dark lord being destroyed in the seat of their power is hardly something FiM came up with.

@Trickquestion  
The idea of Sombra being that powerful always weirds me out. Even in the cradle of his power, in a place where he could control the ground itself, he got his rump raped. He got the crap beaten out of him so hard that he was rendered intangible, and when he came back, Luna was willing to take him on without help. Well, maybe with Shining Armor and Cadance.
 
Even Celestia used him as a pop quiz rather than taking him seriously.

@Sjogre  
Well, we know the unicorns raised the sun and the moon. That’s one thing.

@PonyPon  
Celestia and Luna were a lot more badass back in the day.

@QueenCold  
Have any feats for unicorns back in the day? At all? We know that Star Swirl was a legend, but that still doesn’t give us any actual information on his capabilities, let alone anyone else.
 
Not that we have much concrete knowledge on the abilities of modern unicorns, either. Aside from Twilight, Shining Armor is the only person that can put a forcefield over an entire city, Cadance was able to put a field of love and light over a similar area, and Rarity, without practice or education, was able to manipulate clouds over the whole of Ponyville.
 
For the other two, the ancient pegasoi were actually militarized, and the earth ponies were likely not allowed to fight, so the ancient pegasoi would probably win while the ancient earth ponies would lose. Of course, that assumes that the modern pegasoi haven’t come up with new abilities and techniques with combat applications in the intervening millennia. We don’t know when the blade wing technique was created, just as an example.

@Trickquestion  
How does a guy with enough power to screw two entire races at once, on his own, lose to the sisters?

@Itsthinking  
I’ve always figured the reasons dragons seem to be always chaotic evil unless raised within the glorious pony master race is that Sombra took the original dragon race and twisted them into bio weapons, removing all good from their minds, like Daleks. It would explain why they grow upon accumulating wealth, the more successful ones increase in power, quickly weeding out the scrubs from the elites, and explains their single minded evil-ness. Coincidently, that’s where Celestia got Spike’s egg: She took one in order to study Sombra’s work before she beat him.

@The_Mungoman  
There’s a difference between a society stigmatizing dragons as evil things and running from them and willfully trying to defeat them in battle based on nothing but their species.
 
I think Spike could maybe sort of understand the first if they told him their one-sided stories (though to be fair the dragons probably think the ponies are evil demons too) but I really don’t think he’d be up for wholesale war against them. Even if he does appear to want to start a trend of dragons with sympathy.

@Sjogre
 
Back in the day the unicorns seemed a lot stronger. All the ponies seemed a lot stronger, actually.
 
Anyway, the idea was not meant to be taken seriously.

@Itsthinking  
Yup, agreed. I wasn’t a big fan of Dragon Quest, so having more evil dragons might draw a stronger picture aabout the whole thing.

@QueenCold  
I don’t think that I called it coexistence if they aren’t willing to defend each other. That sounds more like staying separate, to be honest.
 
Edit: we don’t know how many alicorns there used to be.
 
What about winged unicorns? Aside from Celestia and Luna, they don’t seem more powerful than other unicorns.
 
While it’s unclear how many there were throughout history, there’s been enough that Twilight is unsurprised to see unfamiliar ones in a book.

Through years of evolution and war, all seaponies in existence are unicorn-horned hippocamps.
 
Like so:

Spoiler alert: the sea ponies win||||everybody else dies.

@The_Mungoman  
Maybe, but I don’t think that could happen without a “can I draw a sword against my own people” crisis. First episode is that, second episode is what you described.
 
Turns out, yes. Yes, he can.

@The_Mungoman  
Spike is best Fighter/Rogue

@Itsthinking  
I’m imagining Spike wearing light armour and a short sword, speeding through the dragon’s ranks, stabbing and slashing at heels and legs and breathing fire at vulnerable underbellies.
 
He just got way more awesome in my book.

@QueenCold  
I see this as plausible, because something that I’ve always believed is that unicorns were better and more combat oriented spell casters in the harsher days of Equestria, simply because they had to be in order to survive. Not even Twilight could win a fight against an ancient unicorn, because the older unicorns didn’t have time for the magic of friendship, instead studying the magic of fireball, orb of annihilation and chain lighting. And unlike in D&D, “Equestrian” dragons don’t have epic level spellcasting, so it’s not inconceivable that an army of unicorn mages/jedi could overcome the more physically oriented dragons and buffalo.
 
And yeah, the Hearth’s Warming play just screams “whitewashed.”

@QueenCold  
Bonus points if Celestia herself leads an army.
 
And gee, way to give Spike another existential crisis. :P

@Itsthinking  
S4: world war!
 
Discord, 4 alicorns, the elements, the entire royal guard and their allies of various species vs an army of dragons. Bonus points if changelings are thrown in the mix.

The equivalent of unicorns for zebras are okapis.
 
They are extremely rare to the point where most thing that their race is merely a myth.

Honestly, I can’t see the Hearth’s Warming Pageant as a story element as anything but a way that modern Equestrians paint themselves to be glorious conquerors of a harsh land.
 
But yeah, even a war set in modern Equestria with four alicorns and the Elements of Harmony active would be incredibly harmful to both sides.

@Sjogre  
Who said they were unified? :) They coexisted, as in, not going at each other’s throats all the time.
 
Eh, I’m just being silly.
 
Edit: we don’t know how many alicorns there used to be.

I’ll be honest, I can’t see the ponies winning against a unified nation of dragons. Especially not thousands of years ago, before the Royal Sisters were around.