The problem is with *them* and *their* insecurities. It has nothing to do with you. Grad school is great at bringing up all a person's self-doubt, fears and weaknesses, in part because it is much less structured than undergrad. To combat their own insecurities, people bitch about others for working too hard. Or not working hard enough. Or wearing pink cardigans all the time. Or whatever.
You say that you have some friends in the cohort? That's great. Focus your energy on them. It is possible that once your cohort move away from the coursework and get more settled in to their own research that they'll calm down a bit and stop with the nastiness.
This has been asked in various different places of this forum, and to my looking there's no standardized list a la the US News & World Report PhD rankings where MA programs are ranked. I know that MA programs sometimes publish lists of where their MA students end up if they choose to go further into academia, and if you've found any place like that, that's a good place to start.
What I will say with respect to an MA, however, is that funding should be a top priority for you. There are plenty of MA programs with funding; I got accepted to Miami-Ohio's funded MA during my app cycle. For my money, getting into a fully funded MA at a school that's ranked less than an unranked program is better than paying for an English MA. As a grad student, you have to get used to the idea of not making a lot of money, and debt should only be taken on if absolutely necessary. Lots of the MA programs at prestigious schools like NYU and Chicago are known "cash cow" programs that charge top dollar, and from various reports I've read on here and elsewhere, those programs also take a lot of students, which makes one-on-one connections with professors really difficult to establish. Many are also more general "humanities" MAs, rather than specifically English. That's not to say that students don't succeed or produce great work from those programs, but it does come at a high cost, and unless you have a large cash reserve, IMO it's not worth it.
A funded MA will both give you (relative) financial security, and often the chance to teach, which will be invaluable if you decide to go on to a PhD program. For that reason, I'd recommend going not off of rankings (especially since there are none for MA programs), but rather (a) programs that match you/your interests well, and (b) programs that will fund you.
