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I can't give any educated opinion on the whole "Dawn" thing because I've not even bothered to download her.  That said, I think it would be a shame if she didn't do well, because I do like the idea behind her.

If I were to go into the business of developing a figure for use with both programs, I'm pretty sure I'd have gone the 'two versions' route as well.  Whoever created her deserves to do well because the logic behind her makes sense, makes it easy for the users, and doesn't discriminate either userbase.

To me that's 'good business', and good business deserves to do well.

Actually I think it was bad business as you can see not a lot of content is available and most of it is in one program. While is sounds good on paper to customers, it shifted the burden of compatiblity to the vendors, and considering this is a business of small profit margins, not many ended up supporting that methodology. Any time you put the burden on vendors to do more for the same profit, the less those vendors are willing to do it.

Part of the hype that was generated was the fact that in the there were two native figures, there would be tech to convert content from one platform to another. As a result that generated a lot of excitement for those that felt they got abandoned when Genesis came along. However that tool was something that DAZ created and abandoned as there was too much fighting to even get the tool properly tested (CR2 exporter), and was missing a lot of stuff, and the fact you had to open DAZ Studio to get to it turned off a lot of people.

So really the two platforms came down to leaning to lots of content availability for one app, and limited in another because of the amount of work that is needed versus just creating content once and being able at least get in in both.