Yeah so the soul thing makes sense but Dawn Granger wasn't born into the role of Dove, things like being raped by your possessed former partner and having a magical baby while in a coma really should leave some mark on her.
And I would agree with you about the Kendra thing except for ONE thing (which I do not blame Geoff Johns for and which he seems to have ignored in Blackest Night). Even though it was explicitly said when Johns rebooted the Hawkman title that the soul of Kendra Saunders had moved on to the afterlife and that she had indeed DIED (enabling Shiera's soul to take over the body) at the end of the Hawkgirl run (formerly Hawkman till OYL) Walt Simonson(?) had Shiera's soul leave Kendra's body and Kendra's (who had formerly moved on) was back in possession. This went against everything Johns had set-up about the star-crossed lovers (Shiera basically said "Adios" to Carter and gave her Kendra, saying their curse was over - something she WOULD NOT do). And of course after that Carter and Kendra did (briefly) hook up without Shiera's soul present so yeah he did his great-niece. After that he went to Thanganar and she hooked up with Roy in JLA. But in Blackest Night we are back to the star-crossed lovers who are doomed to proclaim their love and be reborn all over again - except Kendra's soul was never any of those past lives and she wasn't part of the curse, Shiera was. So - either Johns ignored what Simonson and Meltzer did with the whole Shiera/Kendra thing or something is screwy.
Sad though, for all the flack I give him about dropped stories, Geoff Johns did more than anyone to fix the Hawkman continuity only to have other writers get everything screwed up again.