@Background Pony #8F6E
What’s MMDW?? Mysterious Mare Do Well??
If so: No I don’t, because it was never widely considered “the worst”. It had criticism absolutely, but Feeling Pinkie Keen remained the #1 most hated by far until Luna Eclipsed and both were dwarfed by… basically all of Season 3. Season 3 was so despised the writers publicly apologized and pretended it didn’t happen for about the next 3 years.
What’s that? “What’s wrong with Luna Eclipsed”? Nothing - now that we’ve had seven years of Canon Luna. Back then, Luna’s only previous appearance was in her little bitty woobie form in the pilot, and there was an ocean of fanfics and “headcanons” based on that one appearance. Canon Luna rendered all of them null and void. I myself even threw a tantrum over it. (I am rather fond of Canon Luna now.)
As for Feeling Pinkie Keen, this was an example of popular grifting. There was absolutely nothing wrong with that episode other than that it was a bit bland and slapstick-heavy. The problem is that Tumblr (RIP) saw an opportunity to make it political, and misrepresented the episode as “anti-scientific”, combined with the fact that everybody already hated MLP in S1 because the first wave of bronies could not stop constantly shoving it in the face of every single other fandom.
The actual lesson was “You should accept your friends as they are rather than force them to justify their weird quirks and habits to you”, but if people had ever understood what this show was about, it would never have turned the direction it did, so it’s a moot point.
MMDW was just considered a slip-up on the grounds that Dash’s friends were assholes drastically overreacting to some of the
mildest asshole-ness Dash has ever had in the show. It clearly didn’t work, given Dash behaves much worse in future episodes. No significant number of people absolutely despised it, unlike the Tumblr (RIP) campaign against Feeling Pinkie Keen.
By contemporary standards, the high risks they put all of Ponyville in were fine (it was a comedy cartoon with very little drama yet), but by modern standards MMDW is rather uncomfortable and sloppy.