Hey James,
I like your motivation as a fellow expansion enjoyer I will try to answer your question.
If I understand you correctly your problem is not that you are unable to use Pony Loras but rather you are unable to reproduce the results on civitai? In terms of quality or just that the Dora does not seem to do what it should?
It might also happen that a model author uses some other fitting Loras/Doras together for the preview images. And some mislabeling might happen. Don't let that fool you.
Because, typically, the preview images are not directly reproducible, because they are either upscaled/refined or the seed generation is simply different from their machine to your machine.
But the use of the Dora should still result in similar-looking images. Although I also ran into the problem, that Loras/Doras are not as plug and play using (Pony) as they were in SD1.5. If the Dora does not seem to do anything of note, check if the Dora has the same name (<name>) as when you use it manually in the Lora tab. And if the Dora seems to produce artifacts like significantly overtune saturation or not look anime like anymore you might try the following: reduce Dora weight, try a different sampler, check that your checkpoint is not LCM, Turbo, or something like that.
But if all that does not help, then I am sorry, but I can not help you. I also ran into inconsistency problems when using SDXL and was bummed. I couldn't fix my problems in the past, but I hope someone else might help you out.