There’s been three and a half years of the current behaviour, and very few people have come up with a good reason for it to change (aside from the fact that it’s not what they’re used to). I wouldn’t bank on the default keyboard shortcuts changing any time soon (though you can, of course, change them on your own computer).
Check you are reading the latest version. Google often finds online documentation from versions 1 and 2, not version 3. Note the “v1” in the URL you found.
Edit / Remove Rests didn’t exist in Dorico 1.0 which is why your documentation page doesn’t describe it. See https://steinberg.help/dorico_pro/v3/en/dorico/topics/notation_reference/notation_reference_rests_deleting_t.html.
The “start voice” and “end voice” properties still exist, and setting them yourself is sometimes useful, but Remove Rests sets them automatically for simple cases.
Note, you can explicitly enter rests if you really want to. Press , (comma) and the enter the corresponding note (it doesn’t matter what pitch it is). Press , again to get back to entering notes. But apart from memories of Sibelius, you really really DON’T want to 
(I started using Sibelius with version 2).
There are not, as yet, any third-party books about Dorico, nor am I aware of any in the pipeline (not that I would necessarily have inside information about such things, of course).
No, you can’t buy printed manuals from us any more, but you can certainly send the PDF to an on-demand print publisher who could print it for you at a cost of something like £50. However, it’s updated frequently, so that’s something to consider.
This is a little off topic, but I just wanted to check you were aware that you can hide/show hidden items (like greyed-out rests) in Sib by choosing View > Hidden Objects, or pressing Shift-Alt-H.
Since this is not going to change, I suggest you make your peace with it to save yourself needless frustration.
Many of us like the way Dorico handles rests.
You can navigate between notes and rests in the same voice with left/right arrow. I suspect you’ve got yourself in a pickle and now have more voices in play than you need. Might I meekly suggest that you will have more success at using Dorico if you try to assimilate to its way of thinking rather than expect it to confirm to yours? Not that your way of thinking is necessarily faulty, you understand, but rather that you as a human being are capable of flexibility in a way that an unchanging software program cannot be, and whether you like it or not, when you use software written by somebody else, you must at some level accede to the way the designers have chosen to make the software work. Hopefully you will find that they’re not complete idiots and they have given the design some thought.
If you want to attach an example where you find that navigating from a note to a rest or vice versa with the arrow keys doesn’t work, I’d be very happy to take a look.
vanmeule, there has to be something you’re not explaining. Look; here’s a measure that has a note, some explicit rests and an implicit rest (just for fun - it doesn’t behave any differently if it’s explicit). I copy the measure; I paste the measure. What’s different about the situation you’re describing?
edit: the post to which I was replying appears to have disappeared. I apparently don’t have the right to delete posts, so I’ll leave this here for posterity.
Wait a second. Are you using the terms “implicit” and “hidden” interchangeably? Are you talking about situations where you’ve used Edit > Remove Rests?
vanmuele, you’ve written several long philosophical posts here but are relatively new to Dorico. May I gently suggest that time is well spent going through the video tutorials and the manual? Dan Kreider has a nice writeup on Dorico. Nobody grasps the philosophy of complex professional software like Photoshop, Indesign, Excel, compilers and debugging tools etc. immediately.
Little in Dan’s intro book has changed since Dorico 2. You should read it as soon as you can to acclimate yourself to the Dorico environment. Then you can concentrate on what has happened since. It is the way a lot of folks have introduced themselves to Dorico and is a valuable resource.
Dear vanmeule,
(A little off-topic to original post, sorry)
I would love to see your work flow in action at some point, so I thoroughly understand. It seems very intriguing to me, as I take a more traditional approach of composing by creating melodies and motifs and interposing rhythmic structure, then make decisions on voicing structures of the ensemble. Please consider sharing in some capacity (here or elsewhere or by private reply to me) your approach and applied techniques to composition - sounds fascinating to me!!! Thanks for considering this.
Unless I’m missing something (again), it’s really not the same. In-place delete should simply turn a note into a rest of the same length, with no other side effects. The opposite would be nice, too.
No, no, no, no.
If you have a 4/4 bar with three quarter-notes and a quarter-rest, and you delete the third note, do you really want a bar with two quarter-notes and two quarter-rests?
The best advice I can give is either stop trying to fight Dorico (and/or redesign it) and learn how it works instead - or stop using it and find another notation program that works the way you want.
Yes, yes, yes! Absolutely yes!
I get it, you don’t work or think in this way. But I’m coming from a different background and I would find that useful. At least as an option. Or damn, give me the doc to write lua macro 
PS: there is another software which behaves that way, but sucks in many other ways. And telling me to either accept it as it is or find an alternative… should I also accept that it gets bored of repeating a bar after 21 times? From my perspective, it’s not very different annoyance (albeit one is by design and the other is hopefully a bug).
PPS: you know what you get with the ability to replace note with a rest (and vice-versa), with the additional feature of applying those changes while playing (currently Dorico doesn’t do that)? A damn cool sequencer! 
The fact is that Dorico is designed to produce correct musical syntax, and a 4/4 measure ending in two quarter rests is syntactically incorrect. That may not be what you expect or want, but it is syntactically (I might say theoretically) correct.
You can always use Force Duration to override it.
Dorico unashamedly tries to stop people from writing notational nonsense unless they insist (in which case, they can… using Force Duration). I’ve seen quite a few comments to the effect of “I wrote 3 quarters in 6/8, why did Dorico change the middle one, geeeezz, Dorico is so dumb!”
In this regard, it’s a great tool for students and hobbyists.
That couldn’t be more unrelated to the 21-repeat thing.
Uh… no wait… I don’t care if it’s notated by a half rest or two quarter rests.
And I’m really puzzled right now because I have a project where Dorico replaces a note with a rest on delete and I have a project where it pulls later notes to the deletion point. Does it depend on notation properties???
See how on deletion of that second 16th note everything else got pulled back by a 16th? Sorry if it’s something stupid again. As I said, I tried in a new project with defaults and it doesn’t do that there.
I guarantee you have Insert mode turned on for one project, but not in the other.
You may not care about the two quarter rests vs. a half rest, but the former is simply incorrect. Again, if you really want to do that, you can. Turn on Force Duration.
1 Like
Holy Batman, you are right, thanks!
To my defense, I did read this section of the manual, but unfortunately it doesn’t have a link/reference to insert mode, so I was under the impression that insert mode is active only when the caret shows V.