Dana always had a *massive* chip on her shoulder about the fact she spent absolute years working on Ozy and Millie but Newspaper syndicates always rejected it. It's no longer on the archived comic site - but there used to be a whole "early history" section documenting the early strips which came before she really started the series proper and her attempts to sell it to papers who would often ask for more sunday strips or better quality. Early O&M hasn't the best inking quality, it got better over time.
Ozy and Millie could be quite smart sometimes, but mostly it was riding the coattails of Mr Waterson's work a bit too much without being quite as charming. I loved the characters, but Dana always let the idea that, one day, she might get O&M syndicated pull her back from doing any significant character development.
At the time she had a dedicated fan-forum called "Define Cynical" which consisted of fans following the comics. She used to endorse it, but the fans found she become quite hostile during her transition and O&M suffered as she went back to college to learn art. Which also led to her dropping traditional inking for digital drawing and new strips starting to look "off" from how she used to draw it. It basically got to a point where the fans themselves became tired and fed up with very half-hearted arcs when Dana was bothered to draw O&M. She eventually announced O&M would be ending and would be wrapping up some plots before moving on. This was also around the time she started working on Raine Dog V1.
The final weeks of the comic consisted of rushed character development, with Llewellyn Dragon and Millie's Mother suddenly going steady and getting married. This made Ozy and Millie step-brother and sister, which rather messed with fans hopes they would be a couple when older someday. Also a saga where the stereotypical "mean girl" character suddenly became goth.
The fans had mixed feelings about Raine Dog to start, but general thought was that it looked sloppy and it took forever for the story to really start....then it did start, with the infamous "talking dog snogs her young boy master" page. While the fan forum had been bit divided on the quality of O&M, there was collective fire over that and Raine Dog's very pretentious "I'm hipster liberal" tone (the comic literally starts with her self-insert in the future getting an overpriced bistro chain coffee while lecturing the audience)
Needless to say, she later called her own fan-forums toxic and it generally just became a bunch of veteran posters hanging out together and re-reading O&M with a critical eye and wondering where it all went south.
Dana eventually got her break by entering an early version of Heavenly Nostrils / Phoebe and her Unicorn simply known as "Girl" when submitted to a syndicate contest. She won and the comic took an age to morph into what it is now, but at it's core it's generally Ozy and Millie with the character cast chopped down. I think she's since ended up working with Toonami a bit alongside her comics. Good for her I suppose, but it's always been a shame she just dropped O&M for slightly blander offerings.