"Other than that, it had a boring villain"
Same goes for season 3 episode 1 and 2. (King Sombra, obviously. Not the stairs.)

"Boring storyline"
Same goes for Look Before You Sleep, The Show Stoppers, Baby Cakes, etc.

"Plain dumb setting"
Same goes for The Mysterious Mare Do Well, Hearts and Hooves Day, Games Ponies Play, etc.

"Animation mistakes"
Rewatch season 1, or just look up WhitehawkePAUNCH's videos.

"Every character looked like a skinny clone of each other"
Almost all ponies in Equestria also have the same basic character model. The only thing that makes them unique is color and mane style. Same thing goes for EG.

"They just HAD to stuff in your typical girly crush thing!"
Hearts and Hooves Day. 'Nuff said.

Normal MLP also suffers from the same problems that EG has, but people don't seem to complain much as they do about them compared to EG. I think you might be over-criticizing.

You make some fairly good points!

Speaking Japanese is definitely easier than writing/reading Japanese. But as you said, what's most difficult is the Kanji you learn.
I've been in the Japanese education system from 3rd grade to 9th, and we learned over 1600 Kanji throughout the years. Quite a mouthful.

This is all from my personal experience so don't trust me fully on this, but I believe that basic Japanese grammar is, as you said, very simple. What makes it hard though is Keigo (敬語).

Keigo is a commonly used part of Japanese, it's a vital part of the grammar, and it always alters your words in able to show more respect to an individual.

For example: "おはよう" (ohayou) means "Good morning" in Japanese. You use it often towards friends or family members, a.k.a people you have a good connection to...
But if you're going to say it to someone with a higher social status than you/older than you, or someone you haven't met before, you must change it to "おはようございます" (ohayou-gozaimasu).

This example is a simple one, but there are many more complicated ways to use Keigo out there. And if you don't use it properly, you can accidentally cause misunderstandings or show extreme disrespect to another person.

Common words and phrases are probably good enough for someone who's only visiting Japan, or just wants to have a basic conversation. But to fully understand Japanese is something very difficult. I've lived in Japan for 15 years total, and it took me 4 of them to fully grasp the basics. 6 more to be confident enough to call myself a fluent speaker.

In comparison, the time I've been in the U.S. is 4 years. I was able to get to this point (the understanding of English shown in this message) in 2. I'm definitely not a master, but I believe that you can at least understand me, right?

I still think that Japanese is (at least) hard to fully understand. English is a flexible and simpler language in my opinion.

If I were to be sending this message in Japanese, you'd know a lot more about how I was feeling when I sent this message, how much level of respect I had considering your opinion, and how much thought I put into it.

In English, I'd have to use independent sentences or emoticons to get that information across.
I don't say that English is an inferior language, it has its pros. There's definitely a reason why it's the most commonly used language in business/international interaction, but I say Japanese has more depth and complexity to it.

Thank you for reading this message throughly, and thank you for sending me one!

-STTD-

Whoops! I forgot you were Japanese while I was writing that message! Sorry 'bout that...
Anyway, I'm a Japanese brony too, but I'll be moving to the United States by April, so I can't see the show when it airs :(
一応日本に残る家族に録画してもらうんですが、やっぱ生で見れないのは悲しいです…（泣）

Haha, you DON'T wanna know how the Japanese bronies on niconico are reacting to it.
Someone even made a "Hitler Reacts" video about the absurd name.� �http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yPOfTlkGCbo
To translate, Hitler's complaining about how Bushiroad are using MLP to advertise Milky Holmes/other idols and how he wanted the original themes to play instead of the J-Pop ones that don't even relate to the message of the show. Then he starts complaining about the Fighting is Magic fiasco and Equestria Girls. I'm probably gonna make an English version of it one day. :P

Japanese-American brony here. I just thought I'd warn you that Japanese is NOT an easy language to learn...
The Japanese alphabet (hiragana alone) has 46 letters compared to English's 26.
Not to mention Katakana, which make the letters you have to remember twice the amount.
Katakana's not too hard, since it's just learning a second way to write the original Hiragana you'll learn.
Katakana's usually used only for foreign words/names anyway... If I were to change your username into Japanese for example, it would be マリオ(Ma-ri-o)レーゾル(re-zo-ru), which would entirely be written in Katakana.
What's gonna be the most difficult is Kanji, which is very frequently used in Japan, and makes learning the language MUCH harder. The first few you'll probably learn are simple ones like 火(fire), 川(river), 日(sun), etc... These ones are easy since they literally look like what they depict.
But stuff starts to get harder when you combine them to make one word. For example, 月 means moon, but when you combine it with the Kanji for sun (the one I previously showed you), it turns into "明" which most people instinctively think means "The sun and the moon". It actually means "bright", and can be combined even further to mean even more things.

I could keep going on and on, but what I'm trying to say is, Japanese is not one of the easier languages to learn. I think it was rated one of the Top 5 languages to learn, next to Russian and Chinese. From my experience I'd say it's about 3x harder to learn than English.
I know this sounds discouraging, but if you truly want to understand Japanese, and be able to fully communicate with Japanese people, you're not gonna make it studying it once every week for a few hours (that'd probably take decades).
You're going to have to go 100% on this, be willing to sacrifice a lot of your free time, and maybe even attempt temporarily moving here, which can probably shorten your learning period into a few years. I'm sure this probably sounds overwhelming, but it's not impossible to learn Japanese, you're gonna have to 頑張る (work hard/make an effort), and be truly focused. From the comments you received I see you have support from the community, and good areas to start. I wish you good luck my friend!
幸運を祈る！ -STTD-