No, that’s not accurate. Everything in Dorico is rendered using primitives such as lines, rectangles and curves, and font glyphs. However, it is the case that a few of the custom buttons that we are drawing in the panels are not yet fully high-DPI enabled, and this is true on both Windows and Mac.
If Dorico won’t start on your computer, I would recommend that you restart your computer and try running it again, or at the very least check that no VSTAudioEngine or Dorico processes are left in a zombie state before you try running it again.
Just a quick update: the next day after activation (00:00+), Dorico has started fine, though was very slow (maybe due to running inside a virtual machine placed on HDD; I’m going to try again later. Maybe).
I suspect this might be a classic 0±1 bug in the trial-period-check logic in Dorico or in eLicenser.