Talk:The Cutie Map - Part 1/@comment-1439415-20150406043830

I was thinking that perhaps giving the Mane 6 the means to defeat Tirek and giving them a castle was all that the Tree of Harmony intended to do for them, as Rainbow Dash assumed. The only reason why it gave them their assignment was to shut up Twilight. It heard her go on and on about "there has to be more than this", so it gave Twilight what she thought she wanted. [Pretty much similar to why Princess Celestia had to assign Twilight to study friendship in Ponyville: giving her an excuse to stay with her new friends while still allowing her to continues her studies.]

Of course, the Tree decided to take some advantage of this. It probably had been observing Equestria in some manner for a while and had a mental check list of things, and now it had willing volunteers.