The biggest twist planned so far? Swetie Belle has taste for human flesh.

1. It's a spinoff, which to me at least implies that it's going to be an alternate continuity from the main show, meaning if it sucks we can just ignore the thing.

2. Regarding this:

It's just like...this show took off because they avoided vapid cliches like that. Now we're apparently jumping headlong into them because Hasbro wants to be Disney but hasn't figured out that they're doing amazingly well specifically because they're not being Disney.

We can't really say that they're "diving headlong into them" yet because we've literally only seen one frame of the show, and that even that might change. It might very well be a high school setting, but again, execution trumps concept. What baffles me is that people keep talking about how it's going to obviously be terrible despite the fact that FIM itself is an example of that exact line of thinking being wrong. Let's go back a few years to before FIM started airing. Hasbro announces that they're creating a new My Little Pony show. They give you this promotional image:

And this summary of the show's plotline: "Twilight Sparkle is an antisocial unicorn sent to the town of Ponyville by her mentor Princess Celestia to learn about the magic of friendship".

Without any prior knowledge of the series, it sounds every bit as vapid, girly, and cliche as any previous incarnation of the franchise. And it turned out to be great. So why are we assuming the same things about this new spinoff even though we know for a fact that a cheesy-sounding summary has resulted in a quality show? I'm not saying that the spinoff will be great; it might very well be awful. But let's hold off judging that until the damn thing actually airs, or at the very least until we have some more information.

3. I'm honestly quite interested in how this will influence the characterization. I know the worldbuilding and fantastical elements draw in a lot of people, but personally the biggest draw of the show has been the personalities, and I'm curious about if this show will be able to keep those intact. I'd like to see how their personalities interact in a mundane setting.