Sisterhooves Social is a milestone episode for so many reasons. For starters, it's the first episode ever not to have Twilight Sparkle crammed into the middle of it.
It is the beginning of a six-season arc of conflicts between Rarity and Sweetie Belle.
It's also the first time that a character uses an Earth euphemism and replaces the word "God" with "Celestia." The fans had been doing that already for a solid year of course, but here, Rarity actually says the words, "With Celestia as my witness!" And it was a big deal - even as a joke.
It was the creative team's way of recognizing and acknowledging what we, the fans already knew: that the point of MLP:FIM is to teach us humans that the Universe is steered, not by Science, (as previously believed), but rather, by magical horse princesses whom we must worship and adore as our gods.
Sisterhooves Social set the standard for tearjerker episodes moving forward. I don't want to say that it created a "formula" because there's no cookie cutter template that FiM's writers followed per se, but Sisterhooves Social did accomplish something totally new.
Throughout Season 1, we saw a lot of inspiring moments, usually framed by a moral. Sometimes the moral itself was central to the action like in Green Isn't Your Color, Look Before You Sleep, or Suited For Success. Sometimes, it was secondary, like in Sonic Rainboom, where Rarity's friendship lesson was overshadowed by Rainbow Dash's dreams, fears, and triumphs as a character.
Season 1 also had plenty of personality clash episodes like Fall Weather Friends or the aforementioned Look Before You Sleep, but those were all morality plays centered around Aesopian life lessons.
Sisterhooves Social...isn't. The characters don't represent virtues or personality traits. This isn't a matter of two characters in the wrong needing to learn lessons.
It's a conflict between sisters, both of whom have firmly understandable needs that happen to be in conflict with one another. And while Rarity was ultimately wrong in her initial dismissal of the idea of participating in the Sisterhooves Social, the entire scenario was a powderkeg to begin with.
Rarity has a deadline to meet. Sweetie Belle has a reasonable expectation of quality time with her sister. It's a tragically familiar situation.
The moral isn't a parable it all.
The point of Sisterhooves is that life is messy. And friendship/sibling hood is hard.
When one of the parties is a child, and the other is an adult, the adult has to do with it takes to make it work, and to set things right.
This entanglement of more complex themes makes Sisterhooves Social fundamentally about characters rather than ideas. As much as I love the show's parable-style storytelling, (in fact, I consider it MLP's greatest strength), branching out into something more only made the show better.
When it first aired, Sisterhooves Social was a lot of people's favorite episode. It was certainly mine. It laid the groundwork for what the show would become and how it would approach both character development and character conflict for the remaining seven seasons.
It remains a much-beloved story, but I didn't stop to think about its profound influence on the tone of the entire show until I went back and rewatched the series a second time after it had finished.
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