>>/10760/
> Twilight Sparkle was mostly a good foil/voice of reason and I liked how she did get (relatively) rationally persuaded to the position that Zecora had placed the curse on them. 
This happens later with eventually giving up on finding an explanation for Pinkie Pie's weird abilities too. But I like to think moreso that it's her accepting that some magic doesn't fit the model she's familiar with applying to the understanding of magic in the world, rather than just accepting that some things are unknowable.
>  They clearly aren't xenophobic, just scared of things unknown,
It's a distinction people seem to find difficult to make, yet it's a fairly big difference - a real xenophobe, to my mind at least, is well versed in their hatred of others. If you don't know anything about someone and are scared of them as a result, that's really somewhat rational - hating them for being unknown, on the other hand, is rather different. Again which is sort of why I think making it a race thing was perhaps a mistake - humans are almost all, by now, aware of other races, at least those humans that watch my little pony, so the fear of the unknown angle gets mixed up with a very different irl issue. Certainly children might be unfamiliar with other races (I was, I remembering pondering as a 6 year old whether people with dark skin were wearing paint) but that's not quite the same thing as fearing the unknown, at least in my mind. You quickly learn that other cultures are different rather than unknown, it's not a mystery who or what these other people are. But it IS a mystery to the ponies, so it's really a very different sort of issue altogether. 
>  It might have been better without as direct a racial subtext or slightly tweaked in some ways. 
A creepy old pony with a witchlike reputation would have worked perfectly imo, though I like Zecora as a character so I wouldn't say I necessarily lament the choice they ultimately went with.
>  Got some laughs and also made me wonder if AJ could repeat that feat with a much larger creature. 
Maybe she could have tried that with the dragon!
>  I love Pinkie's song here, really I state again. Have an 8 bit version from the legendary RC88 
I definitely prefer it in 8-bit format!
 >>/10787/
> having a dark context to Twilight's character if you take it with her increasingly having trouble with stress from "princesshood".
Part of my exact issue with this is that for me, I have a lower tolerance for stress, but that doesn't mean that I'm neurotic. But again the issue with this show almost across the board seems to be that the characters start out with nuances that gradually get simplified away as the show goes on, simply because it's almost impossible for a show working off a freelance-writer model to maintain those subtleties effectively. Fanfictions sometimes reflect some of these nuances better insofar as the fandom picked up on some of the neat little details of the characters and really ran with them, but that too is a mixed bag, sometimes for similar reasons, and sometimes for very different reasons. 
> I've always thought of it from more a neurotic/OCD angle
From what I've SEEN of OCD (not a lot), it looks like it's more phobia-oriented. I have phobias myself, and whilst phobias can cause stress, when exposed to them I usually just shut down rather than get worked up. But as I say, I really don't know. I'd say my interpretation is that Twilight is neither OCD nor autistic, but merely is closer on the spectrum to both whilst still being a neurotypical. (and my understanding is that someone with one is more likely to have the other, so there is a certain link I think). And for the record I think ponies would necessarily have very similar psychologies to humans given the way we see them behave in the show. It kind of makes more sense of EQG even, where the two worlds are linked and mirror eachother.