gonna copypaste what i already wrote about my thoughts
in general the episode had really weird pacing. Everything felt like it was being hurriedly shown and explained to the audience before moving onto the next thing. It didn’t help that I think the ep was trying to do too much at once - first it set up a situation of an election between two characters (which could well have filled an episode by itself), then it decided it wanted to turn into a character development and backstory exploration episode for one character (which also could have been its own episode - and probably should have, considering that stuffing it into less than half of an episode made it feel rushed and out of character), then it was yaaay we got our cutie marks everyone celebrate. Stuffing all of that into 22 minutes doesn’t seem like it was the best decision and considering how these are main characters you’d think they’d be able to dedicate a two-parter to them getting their magic butt tattoos that they’ve been clamouring after for five years.
Apart from that, the episode says that they’ve decided their special talent is helping others understand their own cutie marks - but this is something they’ve only started doing this season, so to use it as the justification for a big character development moment feels a bit like the current writers care more about their own plans for the characters than they do for keeping them consistent with their previous characterisation, if that makes sense. I feel like they should have waited longer and spent more time having the characters actually help other characters understand themselves if they were going to have them realise it’s their lives’ calling, you know?
Overall the episode didn’t feel very coherent; the character development was done too quickly to feel natural, and the plot had too much going on for too short a space of time. It felt less like an episode of a show and more like the writers begrudgingly throwing something together to appease someone.
that said, how funny would it be if the whole "our special talent is helping other ponies!" thing was because hasbro plan to kill twilight sparkle in the 2016 movie like optimus prime in the 80s transformers movie, and the cmc are gonna take over as the princesses of friendship
these are both a marked improvement. not to be mean but the designs they went with are ugly as sin

they're over-detailed and complicated compared to the marks for the other main characters, and the matching colour schemes feel too uniform. the stripes in particular are an awful choice