also, I forgot about other two things: Snips has had found his place in this show as well with a little business for selling stuff and make profit, feeling like he has a sense of accomplishment on what he does. He has obeyed Trixie in the past as one mindless slave and now, he has been seeing how Snails has found an outstanding success with the Buckball team since season 6, so he has tried to find a little niche out there to thrive and offer his own mark to Ponyville.

Another one is Smolder but this is minor stuff. She has had nightmares about doing girly stuff like drinking tea with ponies who gossip a lot (What Lies Beneath) and dressing up with a nice look (Uprooted). She says that she wants to look cool but she secretly hides her attraction towards the girly stuff that would make her look foolish on public (like his brother Garble with poetry).

now, why does this resolution happen? The squad seemed to act stupidly while practicing the performance without Rainbow, without knowing how to do simple/trivial stuff such as using a party cannon.

I wouldn´t blame anyone for thinking in that way but the more I asked about how this 4d chess happened, the more I realized that the squad has been subtly acting as well. This is really tricky to explain and one has to make an effort for projecting this stuff.

I have paused the episode a few times because those little expressions reveal a lot...in hindsight.

First of all, they have had quite a lot of time to plan this stuff because they have had two weeks for preparing all of this. It seems that they fuck it up until the previous day for the match and Dash decides to solve it. However, they could have had inner dialogue among themselves on how to convince Dash for spending time with them.

There are a few scenes that sort of prove that they are not acting stupid nor clueless. The most obvious scenes (relatively speaking) are when Smolder gets angry because of Dash´s lack of attention towards their actions. She is the most direct character of the squad that points out the problem without revealing the plan, making Dash more guilty if necessary.

However, I want to say that the squad direct their faces towards Dash all the time and they spend time at performing only aiming at her. One little detail reveals it when the squad gets blindfolded by Snails. They seem to play that "game" from Snails but Yona decides to take off the tissue and you have to see her faces when she notices that RD is leaving the room. That´s when one can tell that the squad does it solely because RD has to be the star of this experience and not anyone else. All of this by agreeing with Twilight beforehand.

This argument might end up as the most difficult one to explain by typing it and it´s easier to spot this subtlety by observing closely the expressions of those 5 cheerleaders whenever Dash pays attention to the buckball team instead of focusing on them.