Knowing what we know of Joss Whedon today, I think at least 70% of the problems with Dollhouse were Whedon's own issues. It came out in an interview that morall

Knowing what we know of Joss Whedon today, I think at least 70% of the problems with Dollhouse were Whedon's own issues. It came out in an interview that morally dubious character Topher was Whedon's close to a self-insert character, and that tracks and also explains a lot about the show's problems. I maintain that Seasons 3 and 4 of Westworld were quite good, but not enough people watched them because they got lost or otherwise fell off in Season 2. But you sort of have to understand Season 2 to get a lot of what 3 and 4 did, to the show's peril. (Massive spoilers: I refer to Season 2 as the Futurama Robot Church season as I think the Season 2 arc was largely about how Delores was the Robot Devil, like in the Futurama Robot Church stories if they were not played for laughs. A lot of what Delores does in S2 and S3 maybe doesn't make half as much sense without that context. S2 trying to be an S1-like puzzle box made the meaning of that a lot less clear than it should have been. Not to mention how many people didn't want Delores to take that dark of a turn, despite it being deeply telegraphed in Season 1, and per flashbacks had already happened once before, hence the whole weird Wyatt thing.)