I’ve realized that my opinion of the Tommy and Dream dynamic as it currently stands, and as it’s stood for some time, is that it’s… just kinda boring.
The problem is not that their dynamic is uninteresting per se: I think there’s plenty to be said about how Tommy has the ability to push Dream’s buttons (both intentionally and not) in ways practically no one else can, and how Dream reserves a genuine spite and even sadism for Tommy that he simply doesn’t have for anyone else.
The trouble is that it’s stagnant. It hasn’t changed since exile, and it’s not going to change, and that’s because Tommy has an extremely shallow understanding of what Dream wants from him, and it’s in Dream’s best interest to keep things that way.
Tommy assumes that he’s Dream’s top priority/nemesis, which he’s assumed for a long, long time, and that Dream’s actions are always calculated with the goal of hurting him. But this is not true. Doomsday, disk finale, his murder in prison, even exile: every one of those things had huge ulterior motives that weren’t actually about hurting Tommy or toying with him. Tommy assumed that all those things were personal, which wasn’t altogether unreasonable since Dream intentionally encouraged this assumption by cackling at him like a movie villain, but Tommy is demonstrably incorrect.
So Dream puts on an act and Tommy buys it and that’s not going to change—because Tommy is traumatized, reasonably, and because the act is useful to Dream. Instead of learning more about Tommy or Dream, or getting anything sincere in terms of development, it’s the same recycled dynamic over and over again: Tommy’s afraid of Dream, Dream puts on his evil voice, and nothing of actual character substance is happening. There’s simply nothing there.