Ralin wrote:So I realize this is very belated and I hope I'm not breaking any necro rules, but it took awhile for it to occur to me. In Boast Busters we hear Spike talk up how good at magic Twilight is compared to basically everypony else.
Spike says 'twenty-five different kinds of tricks and counting'. 'Trick' doesn't sound powerful, and besides, we know Star Swirl
invented over 200 spells. Twilight kind of pales next to that.
Lurks-no-More wrote:AJ runs the family farm; Pinkie Pie is a baker's apprentice and does party planning and catering on the side; Rarity owns and runs a small business, and is in progress of breaking into fashion industry; Rainbow Dash and Fluttershy are pretty much civil servants, the former leading Ponyville's weather team, and the latter acting as a wildlife control officer; and Twilight is a grad student with a Royal grant to study friendship, who also works part-time as the Ponyville librarian.
AJ does that only out of necessity. All other ponies are still apprentices, the only one that looks like anywhere near self-sufficiency is Rarity, and seeing she is pretty much unknown even in Ponyville ("never heard of you") we can scratch the idea she is full adult.
Wing Commander MAD wrote:I looked at the transcript for S1E16 on the wiki, and they specifically say flight camp.
I meant the "Get kicked outta any flight schools lately?" line which works as insult only if RD was kicked out of school.
Fluttershy says she was a weak flyer, and often parents will enroll their kids in camps or extracurricular activities to "improve" on areas they are perceived to be weak in or just because the parents feel the kid should do that.
Fluttershy has
nightmare trips before friendly adult audience, complete with bullying background phrases, admitting that yes, she will "quit" the test, suggesting she did it as child. Hence, not finished school.
Applejacks "fancy mathematics" remark in S1E3 may have been more in line with the country bumpkin stereotype being played up for laughs than an actual indicator of her intelligence, along with her over estimating her abilities.
Seeing she constantly struggles to keep farm afloat even given monopoly on local miracle fruit (and that local business pony given access to small portion of these fruits become filthy rich) I'd say it's quite correct indicator
Canterlot appears to be the equivalent of Paris to the Equestrian fashion world, which would explain Rarity's awe at it and at Twilight being from there.
But why someone living less than a day from Paris be in awe of it unless he/she felt worse? Let's see, "Canterlot?! Oh, I am so envious! The glamor, the sophistication! I have always dreamed of living there! I can't wait to hear all about it!" directed at a pony who she knew lived there some time suggests
everyone there is superior in education to best stuff Ponyville can offer, there is also Rarity desperately hiding the fact she was merely
born outside of it, suggesting everyone she meet shared the same opinion.
Her reaction around the window washer or her friends at the party was one of horror because she was trying to be something she wasn't for the sake of fitting in to the point where she forgot not only who she was, but also who her friends really were. That was the lesson of the whole episode.
Which is why I hated it, because it was pretty much 'don't rise above your station, rube' type of lesson.
Babs arrives at the family reunion on what appears to be a taxi (whether that is all the way from home or just from the train station in town to the farm is unknown). We see a tour bus in the Mysterious Mare Do Well along with mechanized floats in Babs Seed. We see airships in several episodes and of course the train, hot air balloon, and carriages/coaches featured in others. When Sweetie Belle stays with Rarity she refers to her fathers wagon in much the way one would refer to a personal automobile. Ponies are certainly not lacking when it comes to non-pedestrian means of travel.
Though, series show they are either very new development (train that was absent in S1) or means of travel for filthy rich (zeppelins, coaches). It's like pointing at knight's warhorse in medieval age and arguing non-pedestrian means of travel were common because most knights had them, despite good horse being worth more money than peasant village saw in a generation.
The non-unicorn ponies are shown writing with their mouths, though that may lead to decreased written word and heavy use of mechanical print and pictograms compared to humans.
Aren't all examples of their attempts we saw were pretty awful, on par with human three year old?
Relevant 
For example, just about the only traffic signs in the U.S. with written words on them are those that identify a particular location or road by name, speed limits, and signs commanding the driver to stop and/or yield to other traffic at a particular location. One does not need to be able to even speak or read English, the only language in my experience that road signage is printed in, to be able to legally be licensed and operate an automobile.
Such pictograms are used everywhere, but there is difference between symbol that needs to be legible from speeding car and leave no doubts what it is and any normal means of communication. Also, sorry, there is a lot of writing, at least on speed limit and speed raises signs, as well as weight and height limits. You need to be able to at least read numbers and recognize what the unit symbol behind them means.
Yeah. Someone else can go first.
I guess I'll be adding Equestria Girls to the list of TV/movies I want to pickup eventually. I swear I don't even know why I bother with broadcast/cable television anymore...