In S2, her role was advisory, with the shots being called by someone else.
This wasn't a completely sharp cutoff, as a lot of the work for early S2 episodes was done during calendar-S1, if I'm reading sources correctly.
S1 wasn't perfect, and S2 wasn't abysmal, but: S1 kept characters' personalities reasonably consistent, kept the setting pre-industrial-revolution, had an over-arching storyline that showed up in a few episodes (preparation for the Gala and the Gala itself), kept the setting canon itself adequately self-consistent, and introduced relatively few "we need a new toy" items (the CMCs are debatable; they're cool, but they're also something marketing would adore, as they're targetted at a slightly different age group _and_ are new figures to make toys of).
S2, by contrast, has characters acting completely contrary to their established personalities because the writers felt like it (Last Roundup, with Applejack being evasive and outright lying the whole episode), playing them as exaggerated charicatures in other episodes ("Putting Your Hoof Down", arguably "Lesson Zero"), moving the time period forward to mid-industrial-revolution so that they could sell a toy train, and introducing new characters who were best friends/best foal-sitters of main characters, and an entire race of evil enemies clearly visible as a dark blot on the horizon but never mentioned in the past two years, in order to have new toys to sell (Canterlot Wedding; Cadence/Cadance was turned into an alicorn late the the development process, and Shining came out of absolutely nowhere).
Things have slid downhill increasingly rapidly since the midpoint of S2, and I'm truly afraid of what S3 will look like.
Faust had creative _control_ in S1 only.
In S2, her role was advisory, with the shots being called by someone else.
This wasn't a completely sharp cutoff, as a lot of the work for early S2 episodes was done during calendar-S1, if I'm reading sources correctly.
S1 wasn't perfect, and S2 wasn't abysmal, but: S1 kept characters' personalities reasonably consistent, kept the setting pre-industrial-revolution, had an over-arching storyline that showed up in a few episodes (preparation for the Gala and the Gala itself), kept the setting canon itself adequately self-consistent, and introduced relatively few "we need a new toy" items (the CMCs are debatable; they're cool, but they're also something marketing would adore, as they're targetted at a slightly different age group _and_ are new figures to make toys of).
S2, by contrast, has characters acting completely contrary to their established personalities because the writers felt like it (Last Roundup, with Applejack being evasive and outright lying the whole episode), playing them as exaggerated charicatures in other episodes ("Putting Your Hoof Down", arguably "Lesson Zero"), moving the time period forward to mid-industrial-revolution so that they could sell a toy train, and introducing new characters who were best friends/best foal-sitters of main characters, and an entire race of evil enemies clearly visible as a dark blot on the horizon but never mentioned in the past two years, in order to have new toys to sell (Canterlot Wedding; Cadence/Cadance was turned into an alicorn late the the development process, and Shining came out of absolutely nowhere).
Things have slid downhill increasingly rapidly since the midpoint of S2, and I'm truly afraid of what S3 will look like.