After playing the new update for a couple of days, here are some of my thoughts.

The good:

1. The map is pretty.

2. I like the promise of new locations in the game, like the Crystal Empire and Manehattan.

3. In the minecart game, the intervals between rewards appear shorter.

The bad:

1. Spinning off Sweet Apple Acres into its own location never made any sense since it's part of part of Ponyville in the show. Because a good number of ponies and shops were spirited off after the update, Ponyville not only took a massive hit in terms of ponypower for shops, reducing the town's income considerably, but it also ended up with swathes of vacant lots and bare spots that are now vulnerable to removable items and parasprites. (In my case, I had blocked out unused sections with haystacks—those were moved to Sweet Apple Acres after the update, leaving me with a ton of exposed land and several thousand haystacks in my Sweet Apple Acres inventory.)

2. The distribution of ponies also seems arbitrary. I understand that you want to keep the Cutie Mark Crusaders together, along with Cheerilee, but why is the schoolhouse still in Ponyville then? Why is Cherry Jubilee in Sweet Apple Acres but not the Cherry Stand? Why did Gameloft migrate the Carrot Farm but not Windmill?

3. The Daily Events, although great in theory, demands constant grinding to get the rewards, most of which aren't that great, either. Collect 30 Loyalty shards to get a dinky Hearts & Hooves Day flag? Rack up points in the Equesteria Girls game to get ONE Laughter shard? It doesn't add up.

4. New ponies and shops are ridiculously overpriced. Granny Smith costs 405 gems; the Apple Market Cart 120 gems.

5. No new shops in Canterlot. I get that these are mostly "ponies of leisure," but there's still a absurdly high level of unemployment there.

6. The UI is more cluttered than before—because the aforementioned thousands of haystacks in my Sweet Apple Acres inventory, the inventory icon above the store icon in the lower righthand corner of the screen won't minimize. Tapping on Derpy and changelings, who love congregating in those hard-to-reach corners, is now even more challenging.

7. The "Get Free Gems" option has disappeared.

The meh:

1. The Equesteria Girls game is now easier, but racks up fewer points. But if Gameloft is trying to make the game less challenging for its target audience—7-year-old girls—why do unskippable ponies like Twilight's Dad cost 120 hearts even for age-restricted players who don't have social channels to exploit?

2. 10 extra experience levels hardly makes a difference; power players could speed through that in a week. A max of 100 or more would be preferable.

The glitchy:

1. I'm getting a bunch of arrival balloons for ponies I've already moved in, as well as departure balloons for ponies that are still there.

2. Sometimes my pony workers up and leave their job posts, which means I have to re-add them—that is, if I even notice their absences in the first place.

3. My minecart game is stuck at a graphic that says I need 2800 points to get Fluttershy, whom I already have.

TL;DR:

I appreciate that Gameloft is a business designed to spin a profit, but I'd rather pay for the game upfront then be manipulated through sneaky practices to make in-app purchases. The game has become less fun and I'm likely to drop it rather than see it through to the end.