Enid clearly loved dogs - but I was always puzzled as to why Timmy was one of the Famous Five, whereas Buster was tacked on the end as The Five Find-Outers AND DOG (my personal favourite series of hers); but poor old Scamper didn't get any billing at all! Mind, he did occasionally get promoted to being a temporary member when one of the children was otherwise unavailable. Am I a bad person for finding it funny that they proudly had 'SS' on their shed and badges?!
The Naughtiest Girl was actually quite revolutionary, as it put far more power in the hands of the children, rather than adults automatically ruling everything and children naturally expected to fall into line and do what they were told by their elders. It was actually based on a real school: Summerhill in Suffolk.
Yes, Blyton exploited the common device in fiction whereby children seem to stay the same age for years - even though mention is made of time passing by, characters having birthdays and previous years; however she does sometimes allude to it, particularly in regards to some of the boys getting taller and stockier - especially with Fatty, when in the earlier books, he plays on the fact of them being very much children, but in later ones, he realises that he can disguise himself as adult men and get away with it.
A small part of me felt sorry for PC Goon, as it was his actual profession and livelihood that these kids were showing up and potentially threatening with their fun; but he was actually a truly nasty character - not just bumbling, but deeply unpleasant. If he had been a real police officer and around now, I can well imagine him making the headlines - and not for positive or praiseworthy reasons.
I always think how much mobile phones would have completely thwarted a great many of the plot lines and the peril, had they existed back then! The ubiquitous drawing/tracing of patterns of the tyres on 'suspicious' vehicles and footprints (do they differ that much?!) that they so carefully made would also have taken a fraction of a second for them to snap with their smartphone cameras!
I also sometimes find myself wondering about silly little things that, curiously, Blyton never thought to mention. Like, when the characters are trapped/locked in rooms overnight, she makes mention of what food resources they had with them or otherwise that they were 'starving' when they finally escape or are rescued... but there's never a whisper of a word about the pile of poo that they surely must have had to leave in the corner of the room where they've been imprisoned for sometimes several days, nor the resulting smears on the curtains that they would have had to use for a secondary purpose!
I agree with PPs that it was grossly unfair to denounce EB as a terrible writer. Yes, if she'd taken a bit more time with each book and written far fewer, the quality would have been better; mind, we're so used to computers nowadays, it's hard to remember back to what it was like with typewriters - no simple delete function, no going back to edit, no copy and paste etc.
Ultimately, she knew her audience and she was writing books that children wanted to read - not necessarily ones that their parents would have chosen for them to read - and they most certainly did. We're still talking about her books now on this thread, getting on for a century later. Blyton's stories had that addictive sense of excitement and adventure - they were never intended for readers to be poring slowly and critically over every adjectival pronoun and conditional clause, whilst pompously twiddling their bowties. Some authors are highly intellectual and can write books that are technically academically nigh on perfect; but they're just so extremely dull. Do we prefer imperfect books that children will eagerly read, or perfect ones that get left closed on the shelf?