I started watching and entered the fandom hardcore back in season one so it's a very special kind of nostalgia for me. It would be super hard for me to pick a worse season but because of the special nostalgia factor it's pretty much impossible for me to pick season one as such. XPBack in my early childhood I watched G1 and had a couple of the originals as hand me downs from my big sister. (They where like new since she didn't care much for ... she got into monster trucks quick so I got ponies. XD) Mix that with the fact that my favorite media other then G4 MLP is slice-of-life Animes like Lucky Star... and you start to see why I was hooked from Ep1 and why it became my all time favorite series.I agree out of all the mane six it seems like Dash has been the slowest to mature out of the group, mainly due to her own stubbornness to look past her own perceptions of the world. It's funny given her adventurous nature that really she has the least life experience of the mane six as well, I assume mostly due to her... rather intense obsessive behavior. I've know a couple people like that and they take a long time to grow. She's learned and changed a lot over the seasons which is really thrilling to see, since so often in anime you get those same kind of characters and that's it they just stay that way forever no matter how long it runs.As for Gilda I totally agree with everything you said, especially with Pinkie and Gilda bounding over backing being cute.