Have you guys ever done research? It doesn’t just involve ordering and reading one book it means finding the book or rather finding the book that finds you the book, scanning through and translating pages on the fly, making notes, going back to the bits you read before to check that they say what you thought they said. It’s time consuming hard work, the weather /insect life in Scotland is hardly conducive and Dawn’s pretty much in the position of a blind person having to get people to transpose everything into instant Braille for her before she can start. It's hard being large, she's got enough to deal with just finding enough to eat and not freeze/be bitten to death.

Besides which the whole point of Potential wasn’t that Dawn was a crappy Slayer but a brilliant Watcher, it was that she, like Xander, was one of the people without any natural talent but prepared to muck in and do what she could anyway. She’s not that good at research. In S7 she had the advantage of being the only one prepared to do any but she wasted time translating spells from the Turkish when an English version was available and her main contribution towards getting Buffy back inGiD was to goad Willow and Anya into doing the work. It looks like Buffy’s new Slayer organisation includes people who can not only slay better than Dawn but do magic and, most likely, recon better as well. No wonder she’s feeling useless.