Actually, not really. I actually grew up with a lot of PBS as a kid. Arthur, Reading Rainbow, Cyberchase, Bill Nye, a lot of that good stuff, and I was avoiding Barney as much as possible, so having to see it in an area where I shouldn't have to see it is what probably triggered me the most, because you have all these entertaining PBS shows that hold up well and offer real education value, and they play the worst one of all of them. My high school science classes would occasionally play an episode of Bill Nye to support the topic at hand, and I liked those, but special ed, it was just Barney for 2 hours straight, pretty much every day during my senior year.
I think what made me so averse towards Barney and MLP on the Canadian network it aired on was because the network it aired on ended up having a more limited demographic appeal, since it's made for the toddler/preschooler demographic, unlike PBS, and having already seen these autistic wastes of life known as Barneyfags in real life only made me not want to associate with their existence.
Of course, a part of this hate also came from the fact that Reading Rainbow ended up stopping production in 2006 due to budget cuts, because apparently keeping Barney on PBS for 3 more years was more important.