Reading between the lines of Daniel’s FB post that Robin posted above, and looking at recent release dates, the situation with the D5 release seems pretty clear, no? D3.5 was released on May 20, 2020, D4.0 was released half-baked (let’s be honest, we didn’t even get Play mode documentation for almost a year) on January 12, 2022 and then finally 4.3 was released with a fully realized Play mode and Key Editor on November 15, 2022. That’s 909 days between D3.5 and a completed D4. The version history for D4 is over 200 pages long and in addition to a completely rebuilt Play mode, included features like the Jump Bar, Library Manager, and the “have Dorico guess at chord symbols” feature.
By contrast, there have only been 190 days between the release of D4.3 and D5. The D5 version history is 56 pages. I’m sure the team is capable of multi-tasking so it’s not like they had to wait until D4.3 was out the door to start any D5 features, but Daniel has already mentioned how short-staffed they are, so that might not be too far from the truth.
Right around June 1 is probably the perfect time to release software like this. Most US colleges are on a July 1 fiscal calendar, so any unspent money from the previous year can be used to purchase Dorico in June, and then there will be plenty of budget available after July 1. If any students, faculty, or musicians want to try to pick it up over the summer too, there’s often ample time to learn it, when there may not be other times of the year.
I certainly didn’t get much of my D5 wishlist either, so it’s fairly intact as well. I have no interest in the Stage/Space stuff as I use MIR which does it much better, my own doricolib files work better than the Edit Instrument feature (rhythm section chords, score order, 0-line), etc., but I assume they looked at what was achievable before June 1 or so, made sure to have a couple of major new features, and accomplished what they could.
Without a calendar deadline looming in the near future, I’m curious to see how D5 will incrementally develop, or if they’ll just soon start work on D6. I may be wrong, but I’m assuming there wasn’t a conscious choice to ignore so many well-documented feature requests, they just did what they could with the team they had, under the time constraints they were facing.