Has Paulsen spoken why he left the series again? He was such a master at story construction - as you've mentioned numerous times - on this site. Did he return to a series which was beyond saving? A clash of egos on how best to move story forward and well away from Bobby returning from the dead.
This site did a good interview with Paulsen almost 20 years ago (as have others, including
@Garry's DallasFanzine site).
Paulsen got another offer from collapsing DYNASTY to guide Season 9, where he would be the show-runner. (Paulsen got an earlier offer to join Season 6 of DYNASTY as a lowly writer, but they wouldn't give him creative control;,so he declined, knowing his own work would be compromised; if they'd ceded to his terms, the last-half of DYNASTY would be better-remembered). Paulsen also said he already wanted to leave DALLAS before he got the second offer to be the executive supervising producer of DYNASTY for Season 9 in 1988, and then he accepted it (finally fixing DYNASTY after a long period of creative disorganization, although by the time Paulsen got there, the DYNASTY audience was already gone).
Just why Paulsen wanted to leave DALLAS a second time in '88 is anybody's guess, but when you look at the remaining three years of the show, one can figure out why pretty quickly. Sure, it would have been better for DALLAS if Paulsen stayed, but Katzman & Co. had apparently made the decision to turn DALLAS facetious, and Paulsen was smart enough to not want to make the show that way. (Which is why Larry Hagman sniped in the press that it was "probably a good thing" that Paulsen was leaving DALLAS because "he doesn't have a sense of humor" -- but then the actors of DALLAS and DYNASTY seem to have no awareness at all of Paulsen's contributions to their respective series... I suspect Linda Evans knows: she loved the exit story Paulsen gave her after her having nothing to do for years).
Paulsen is a bit of a company man and is careful with his words, so he has publicly defended the use of The Dream, pretending that it worked. But he would
never have used it, had he been running DALLAS himself... That was Katzman's preference, to wipe out the year in which he'd had little involvement (he was listed as a consultant, and wrote some scripts for the season he would later turn into a dream, but he had no control over the plots from Peter Dunne and Dunne's team).
David Jacobs has also said he would have used a different explanation with which to revive Bobby from the dead.
