It has been more than 40 years, but as I recall, I personally did not appreciate DePriests writing on The Doctors very much. It could be that I was just comparing her to other writers of the 1970s (Bell on Y&R, Falken Smith on DAYS, Lemay on AW, Nixon and Washam on AMC, Slesar on TEON, Labine on LoL, etc.) and DePriest came off weak in comparison. But I do remember thinking that the writing for TD picked up under Marland. One critic later wrote, "Marland worked wonders with the garbage he inherited."
I will say, however, that considering the horrible writing on all of today's soaps, I'll bet that if I rewatched DePriest's TD, I would love it in comparison!