I've been racking my brains for the past couple weeks and I've had a few thoughts about my writing coming to me. I know that popularity takes time and I may just be a little impatient, but I can't shake the feeling that I may be out of touch with how things go down on Fimfiction. Just recently, I added a few new chapters on my story To Equestria And Beyond and I feel really proud of what I've done so far. But recently, I can't help but think that I may not be as good as I think. As of last week, I've been looking over my stories and my two most popular stories are Luna's Bad Day (My first attempt at a one shot), and Princess Pregnancy (My first true M rated story). From what I've seen, those stories have one thing in common, no overarching storyline or lore whatsoever. And they seem to be doing much better. Maybe it has to do with certain demographics or maybe it's just a matter of quality and promotion, but I just can't stop thinking that I may be out of the long run when it comes to my longer main story. I could honestly use some help with this constant bug in my brain. Could I be a good writer or am I just so inconsistent with my work that my viewership and like ratios are a result of lack of skill?

People are more likely to get into reading something that's sexual or a one-shot because it limits their time investment, so it's less of a commitment, and those kinds of stories will have generally higher view counts.
Ratings are a better indicator of quality, although they can be affected by simply the content you choose to have...and I suspect including an OC with your name has an effect on that, as a quick look at "Cards Against Couples" shows he's introduced out of nowhere as Cadance's close friend who immediately starts swearing in a manner similar to Rick from Rick & Morty...and that's really not good as a reader for wanting to continue reading.
One other thing to consider, for both view count and ratings, is that longer chapters are generally trouble. Again, time investment, but also, it's harder to do pacing right when dealing with over 4000 words, and many of your stories have chapters of that length.
I would presume (I haven't really investigated, so this is inferring from what little I know of your writing), that your general problem, like many authors, is you make "fluffy" chapters, where there's a lot of words without much changing, which makes readers wanting to get to the meat of your stories frustrated. If this is the case, my advice is to preplan, thinking of each chapter as a transaction where the state of the plot and things in it changes...if a chapter has no changes, then it might as well have not happened, and deserves to be removed from the fic unless the fic is purely comedic in nature.

7823211
Small addition about the fluffy chapters: you can allow yourself some scenes that exist purely to show more about a character. How much, however, depends on the kind of story you're writing. If your story is deeply character focused, then obviously you can allocate a decent amount of words to it. Even then, though, the budget is pretty strict.

The reason oneshots or shortfics like those gain more traction than longfics are mostly just because they answer an intriguing question.

For example, your Princess Pregnancy fic intrigues me because we don't have any stories that comes with dealing with Cadence's position because it is an alicorn foal.

We may have fics that goes through her process, but usually, she isn't the main focus or don't go more in depth with her situation. Just look at Walk Where There Is No Path by theOwtcast.

No one, as far as I can tell, goes in depth about Thorax's journey to reach the Crystal Empire. Their trilogy (series?) goes very in depth from the point of leaving the Hive all the way to his Kingship, and the story still deals with his troubles as a ruler. We clearly know what will happen next, but this author brought so much characterisation and still remain true to show canon, it is no wonder stories like these can flourish.

Tl;dr
No, you don't have any issues with your writing. It is all mostly dependent on how well your description invokes interest or just an interesting concept others haven't come across yet

7823233
Certainly, while every chapter needs to advance the plot, scenes don't all need to do that, but even then, most should help the plot along... Also, one of the benefits of fanfiction is not having to spend a ton of time setting up characters before using them; I think part of the problem is introducing the "Night Fury" character as an OC when he isn't really necessary, creating extra work in scenes.

7823168
Okay 'To Equestria and Beyond' started in 2021, almost 600 000 words (222nd longest fic on this site), 1490 views on prologue, 35 views on most recent chapter ~340 views per chapter on average, 34 likes, 21 dislikes. Yeah, it seems that there is a problem.

First thing that pops out is the tags Gore, Narcotics, Violence and Death on a T rated romance/adventure/comedy, you have Heavy warning tags on Light genre tags, that is very incongruous. Keep in mind that every warning tag is a potential 'I don't want to read this' flag and will reduce the amount of people (the exception is sex, which people will specifically search out). Some flags are worse than others, with Gore, Narcotics, and Death being pretty disliked.

Does your story have death as a major theme? Does it follow the last moments of a character's life as they slowly die? Is there a major event that leads to the mass death of ponies? Is a character struggling with their own mortality? If you answered no to all these questions, your story DOES NOT need a Death tag.

Does your story prominently feature drugs? Is there a major character who's suffering from addiction? Do you have your characters openly use hard drugs? If you answered no to all these questions, your story DOES NOT need a Narcotics tag.

Does your story prominently feature gore? Do you visually describe what happens when a character is ripped apart? Does it involve descriptions of surgery or torture? Do you often dismember characters? If you answered no to all these questions, your story DOES NOT need a Gore tag.

Next we have the genre tags, the biggest problem is 'Romance'. Knowing a story is a romance story does not help if the would be reader has no idea which characters the romance is between. And your front page gives absolutely no indication of who the romance is between (in fact, my first guess would be that the romance is between the OC and Cadence which I really hope is wrong and your OC isn't NTRing/cucking Shining). One thing to note is that just because a story contains a romance, that does not mean that it is a Romance story, nobody has ever accuse James Bond of being a romance series despite almost every movie containing a love interest. If the romance is not an significant part of the story, it does not need a Romance tag.

Comedy is kind of like romance, where just because a story has jokes in it, that doesn't mean that it's a Comedy story. If your story isn't primarily written to make people laugh it probably doesn't need a Comedy tag.

Finally, Adventure, this seems to be the most appropriate genre tag, at least from the description. However, one of the most consistent complaints I have noticed from other readers is a slow pace, which could be a problem considering adventure fics tend to be faster paced.

Thankfully there is a tag for slow paced stories: Slice of Life. I recommend dropping either the Romance or Comedy tag (or both) for a Slice of Life tag.

Next is the cover art, and it's a disaster. Just because the inciting incident of the story is the 'REAL wedding of Shining Armor and Princess Mi Amore Cadenza', that does not mean that a picture of Cadence in a wedding dress is a good cover art. It actually implies that Cadence is the love interest of the story, which is very not good.

Next is groups, and well, it's not good either. All I can tell from your story groups is that it stars an OC and that you really want feedback on the story. Nothing that really useful. Groups serve two purposes:

1. They aggregate stories together based on common theme, giving readers another way to discover your fic.
2. They give a potential reader a finer description of what your story contains (I always check the groups of a story I'm thinking about reading, and it often makes the difference on whether I read the story).

So it's best to put your story in as many relevant groups as you honestly can.

Finally, is the story description, it's extremely vague and tells you almost nothing concrete about the story other than the name of the main character. The "Warning: Story may contain mild suggestive themes and alcohol" bit is also probably not necessary (in fact warning about the story maybe containing alcohol when it's tagged with the Narcotics tag is extremely incongruous).

All in all, your story's front page is very bad at indicating what exactly the story is about, which bad in two ways: it fails to attract people who would otherwise want to read your story and it means that many of the people who read the story will find it disagreeable for whatever reason.

If you would like a more substantive criticism of the actual story (instead of just the front page) respond to this comment or send me a personal message. But be warned, my critique will be somewhat more scathing than some other people's.

7957474
Good Lord, finally! Someone who isn't a puss and can give some actual criticism! I'd love for you to give me some feedback of the story itself. I need to know how I've been doing over the past 3.5/4 years.