I disagree and think the 285K is probably a great CPU to go with.
First I should point out - there were microcode fixes to the CPU since the launch, so the benchmarks will have improved since the launch review. The CineBench scores were quite good already (beating out the 9950X) but the others will have improved.
There’s a good likelihood that Dorico results will be somewhere around DAWbench results (with Reaper as the reference), which show the 285K just beating out the absolute top of the line 9950X3D on the AMD side.
So in Reaper you get just slightly faster performance with the 285K vs the 9950X3D. How does this extend to Cubase? Unfortunately, modern AMD CPU’s tend to underperform Ryzen’s in Cubase specifically, being about 20-30% slower than they should be given the clock speed. The relatively low end Intel i5 12600k ($200) beats out the previous Ryzen generation king 7950X in Cubase performance which should not be the case if you look simply at the numbers.
Only older versions of Cubase end up being exempt from this (ex. Cubase 11 is fine). One of the changes in Cubase 12 was that it had some enhanced scheduling that tried to detect the P-cores and E-cores in the Intel CPUs and distribute the load primarily to the P-cores. Unfortunately this logic in Cubase appears to be a detriment to Ryzen CPUs - testing suggests that Cubase thinks the Ryzens are Intels and tries to find the P-cores and E-cores and distribute the way it would an Intel, which makes no sense and results in subpar performance.
Unfortunately this difference appears to carry forward to the current generation of processors, and even the top of the line Ryzens are hampered comparative to the Intel 285k. Given the launch reviews, you would expect the Ryzen 9950X to be equal to or slightly better than the 285k - but DAW software is its own beast, not the same as what the likes of PC magazine are typically benchmarking. And indeed in the general category of DAW software, the 285k outperforms the 9950X and just outperforms the 9950X3D (but that is much closer). But that’s in Reaper - in Cubase specifically, the difference is outsized, with Intel being favoured for Cubase versions 12 and later.
The only thing is that Dorico is just part Cubase - the audio engine is based on Cubase, so these performance differences should hold for the Dorico audio engine. It is hard to say which would be faster with the Dorico UI itself which runs as a separate process.
I say all this as an AMD fan that would normally want to buy an AMD processor and have in all my previous systems, but don’t want to pay the same price for 20-30% less performance in Cubase - even if I got the top of the line 9950X3D it would be slower in Cubase.