My dog is from North/South American showlines.
I got her from a breeder in Quebec. She is by Tiburon Demolition Man "Wrecker" and out of Fabert's Living in Sin "Sin" (herself by Fabert's More Man than Most and out of Heartwood's Hot Zamba "Reece", which I'll get to in a minute).
Her temperament is in my opinion ideal for a doberman. She is very mentally stable, has excellent environmental nerves and has perhaps even more importantly than the last one, a very good bounce-back. She is watchful, alert, obedient - she is aloof and reserved with strangers outside the home, but friendly and welcoming when I invite someone into the home. She is protective and has been described as being a 'civil' dog by protection trainers rather than a sport dog. This means she focuses on the decoy and the fight with the decoy more than she focuses on the sleeve/suit. Even before she had any formal training she had no hesitation in engaging with a potential threat. She is sensitive but not overly so, and as I said she has a good bounceback so her sensitivity isn't a detriment from where I stand but rather a quality. Interestingly she is LESS sensitive than the two european imports my friend has and better bounce back, even though one of those females is from showlines who work. (Her dogs are very good but it's clearly different). She is highly intelligent and very affectionate.
Her standout qualities to me are her handler focus and engagement. This is a dog that loves to work with me and wants to work with me. Sometimes she will go to the entrance of the house and nudges her SD harness repeatedly while wagging her tail. The other day at the training club she was in her crate and I was sorting through her bag... when I lifted the agitation harness she gave me the sweetest puppy dog eyes with her ears perked up as if to say "please.... open this crate and put that harness on so we can go to the field". She also has a lot of willingness and generally takes things in stride with whatever situations I throw at her. A lot of the titles she's gotten, were gotten without any preparation and just us going in 'cold'. She always tries her hardest to please me.
Another thing I like about her is that she has drive but she tends to remain calm and focused while in drive. Her drive translates into intense focus on what she is doing, and it is actually almost cute to see how intensely concentrated she can be while working. For instance when we practice stacking/conformation often she is paying attention to me so hard and focusing that I have a hard time bringing her tail back up, because she tends to bring her tail horizontal while concentrating. She has excellent food drive, she has intense toy drive for the toys she does like (tug toys) but not much interest for the toys she doesn't (she doesn't care about balls, she'll chase if you throw but wont grab them) and she also thrives on praise - so that makes her a HIGHLY trainable dog.
As a service dog, there were many tasks she knew instinctively the best way to deal with me, I just later taught her how to do them on command if necessary. I get compliments all the time while we are doing public access work on how well behaved she is.
I don't know that there is anything I would change about her temperament-wise she really is well suited to me. Her grips/bites could be better but I know a huge component of that is genetic, yet another component of that is also just training/the breed. A very experienced man in the sport of IGP who worked her said she had a lot of potential a lot more than I may even realize, but she just needed time. He has owned GSDs and Dobermans and said female dobes especially need to be given time to build their confidence in what they are doing in protection, not because they are insecure or skittish but because they so badly want to do the
right thing so they can be hesitant at times. She's been improving by leaps and bounds however. To be clear she has a strong bite, she just doesn't have the full deep grip that IGP wants to see. Other protection sports don't evaluate grips so it wouldn't matter if we were still doing suit work which is what interests me most (but I can't keep bouncing back and forth between sports so I am committed to IGP with her. And if I am to breed her, I'd want to have options for her offspring so I am wanting to select a male with nice full, deep grips.)
Physically she is a moderate, racier type, well balanced, a little bit of a 'throwback' except perhaps for her size (she's the max allowed size for a female in the US/Canada standard). So I don't think she is the type of dog that you personally would like, aesthetically.
Back to her temperament - when I met her dam I knew I wanted a pup from her because what I observed was a real, correct doberman temperament. And as I later found out she had inherited that temperament from her own dam, the aforementioned Reece. The breeder had littermates and the other female did not have the same temperament so I knew I wanted a puppy from Sin. Interestingly Reece comes from a breeder that although are showline dogs, are generally moderate in conformation and has several certified therapy dogs and Reece has a littermate who is both an AKC Ch and SAR certified. I only found this out well after getting Nadia but suddenly her abilities and temperament made sense. Sin had everything I wanted in a dobe - velcro to her owner, stable in a busy crowded area and tolerant but aloof. She was very watchful too. She would patrol the owner's stables every day and then sit at the top of the stairs to the hayloft and watch over her queendom. She was also protective and she was the female they used to choose their puppy buyers.
Nadia (my girl)'s sire was more extroverted and friendly, however he had a good stable temperament and he has several dogs behind him with a WAC. He is a mixture of US lines and Argentine lines and I've noticed the South American dogs tend to be sharper and harder than the US dogs as a whole. And unsurprisingly a lot of US dogs and particularly the ones finding success at the WAE often have south american influences (which became popular to blend in the US because there have been some lovely Argentinian dogs in particular conformation-wise, even though South American countries use the FCI standard their dogs resemble ours a lot more). I know a few people who are successfully training and competing with South American lines in protection sports. Maybe it's because several SA countries still use dobes in their police forces? However as he got older Wrecker developed his protection instincts it seems. When I spoke to his owner recently and told him I was training in IGP he said "if she's anything like wrecker I bet she loves it". He also sent me a couple of videos of him doing "agility" but with equestrian obstacles so he clearly had a willingness and eagerness to please and work.
So overall - Nadia I would say is medium energy (for a doberman) possibly on the high end for show lines with good drive and comes from a sire with good drive and out of a dam from lines with good drive. Her dam passed away recently, she broke her neck in a freak accident while playing, leaving her paralyzed so after weeks of trying other options they chose to put her to sleep. But at 7 she was running hard enough in her usual field for that to happen so I'd say her energy was also mid to high.