That Time I Worked on a Brony Dating Sim
I'm proud to say I was a brony throughout high school and college, but one of my strangest experiences in the fandom was volunteering for a brony dating sim. I can't remember exactly how I found out about it, but from an initial glance the project seemed impressive. The creators had a well-made website with screenshots and plans for a multi-ending VN (basically one ending for each of the Mane 6).
The project's website said that they were looking for volunteers in various capacities like writers and programmers, so I reached out and ended up on the team.
The rest of the experience is a little hazy. I ended up in a chat room with the rest of the people working on the project - except nothing really seemed to get done. Weeks would go by without any messages, and when the project leader would hop in to ask about progress, people would post memes in response - but not much else. Eventually the project leader wrote a final message that they were cancelling the project, and that was that.
Obviously you might laugh at the circumstances, but this experience really highlighted the nature of vaporware for me. Prior to this experience, I'd had a number of letdowns with fan projects that got dropped quietly, and I always wondered how a project that seemed nearly-done could get abandoned entirely. In reality, people sometimes start out with an ambitious demo, but then get burned out as the project gets more and more complex.
Creators aren't superhuman it turns out, and I guess it took this firsthand experience for me to realize that.