>>/12207/
>  Baring weird implications from dragon's being a sentient race, if a hatching a dragon egg is a requirement to enter the School for Gifted Unicorns, why aren't their more baby dragons like Spike running around?
So, I would assume there's several schools for gifted unicorns in Equestria - this, however, is THE genuine article, a school for gifted unicorns in the capital under the personal tutelage of Celestia. Even at this stage of the show where Equestria is a perhaps slightly smaller nation that it will be depicted to be later, it's still a nation of multiple cities. Cities too were smaller in the human past so we can reasonably infer that pony cities might also be smaller than modern human cities in terms of population, however! Even with all that, you're dealing with a population at least in the low millions, I think. We only see Celestia take Twilight on as a personal protege, that is to say, one apprentice at a time at most. All of this is to say that I think it's likely a school with a minuscule student body, as elite as Oxford or Cambridge during the most elitist eras of their history but without the fast-track system of money, clout or class, instead an examination system that a middle-class unicorn like Twilight is able to gain entry from. So: I imagine that the exams aren't set, that is, that they're not all the same. If it was the same test every time, you could practice for it, which would not be optimal for identifying really, truly outstanding talent. It's not like the Imperial Chinese civil service, you really are wanting to minimize the number actually passing the examination. All of this is strictly speculative, of course, but at least my interpretation or headcanon is that it's sort of like a short assigned dissertation, examiners deliberately setting new, somewhat random and creative challenges for potential entrants to try and solve. If I'm honest, I also like the idea of this interpretation, I'm biased on it; it would also make Twilight's background with Spike potentially unique and a happy coincidence, which I like as an idea.
> Rock farm. Never decided if I wanted to to accept it as some sort of mining or rationalize it as earth pony magic working the ground.
It's also a question of what the rocks are actually useful for, since they're not being refined (which would make the 'farm' either a kind of factory or a mine) - I think in later seasons we see them eating rock soup? There's an old story of a soup-stone where a homeless person tricks someone into giving him soup by pretending his rock makes soup taste better, from that idea could come special rocks that absorb energy from the sun and somehow through that process give out edible flavor and nutrients when boiled in water. That's about as charitable a reading as I can possibly give it I think!
> Though lately I've also had sympathy to just saying: "Hey, this is a whimsical kid's show, who cares?" but I still enjoy trying to make it work.
Oftentimes the two can work together to some extent. Magic lets you bend a few rules in a useful way too. Charles Fourier, a fully grown reasonably learned man, once suggested in all seriousness a project to turn the Earth's oceans into lemonade, so with a little bit of fiction and magic to smudge the details I think applying aspects of deeper thinking and reason to these things can make them come alive to a certain degree without simply deflating them with a 'that's not realistic'.
 >>/12208/
> 2:Twilight Sparkle's. Lore! and pre Season 1 Canterlot.
I don't know where the rest would be for me but Twilight's adorable "yes yes yes yes yes!!" would absolutely put it at number one!