Thank you for the notes!
You have a lot of good points, many of them were noted during development, but we ran short on time.
We were aware of the "dog being used as a buffer" strategy, but decided to work around it and include it.
Instead of having the Happiness Meter decrease with every honk of a car; we decided just to have it be the first honk for prototyping, and instead fix the issue with level design.
The plan was to create more levels, and with each level the "Dog Buffer in Front of Traffic" strategy would become less viable, as more roads, curved roads, and a higher spawn rate would be introduced.
As you can see we had to cut many of these stretch goals short to keep within the time frame, but it's good you identified some of the design problems we also had; as it means we were on the right track during development!
(We also had ideas around each Human having their own Happiness Meters, and Family Names that would display to create more of a bond; but these were also pushed back due to time constraints.)
Thank you for playing and thinking about the design/strategy, it means a lot.
(I'm glad you were invested, I think with the above changes it could have been even better)