>>42318189
No, it's not shot. It's good, the problem is entirely with your taste.
You say it's haphazard, but I demonstrated several examples of the system being closely integrated to the plot.
You say it's random, but every school is derived from FiM. There are several schools centered on an emotion: almost all of the magic system shown in the show is centered on emotions. Love, hatred, friendship and anger all have episodes centered around them. Shield magic is the most completely rendered school in the story, and there are a lot of different kinds of shields in the show. Night and Day magic because the princesses are great, even if the show had not delivered on those at the time Archmage was written, it's just good fanfiction. It even manages to dedicate a whole story arc to the hammerspace magic that Rarity so often wields.

You are upset that the story's magic system is not a clean, artificial rule-based Minecraft construct, but there's no requirement that a magic system has to be that way. Magic in Archmage is organic, living and growing just like the shields it describes in Canterlot's caves.