I have to go out for the evening now to direct my choir (one of the fun things about releasing on a Wednesday is that I get an enforced break for a few hours while I travel to, direct, and return from my rehearsal), and I’m sure there will be many more posts from disappointed people added to the end of this thread by the time I get back in several hours.
Naturally we anticipate that people will be disappointed when items from their own wish lists are not addressed in a major release. I wrote about this specifically in the blog post I wrote today (but it was right at the end, so I understand why you not have made it that far):
You should know by now that a major release like Dorico 5.0 is only the beginning of the story. Looking back at the release of Dorico 4.0 in January 2022, it was followed by no fewer than 10 releases over the following 15 months, each of which added useful new functionality along with other improvements. You can expect future Dorico 5.x releases to follow. For starters, we expect the instrument editor to evolve, and we are working on further ideas to improve the expressiveness of playback, and we have something exciting up our sleeves for the second half of this year.
We hope that you will find lots of valuable and enjoyable new features in this update. We have worked very hard over the past several months to build these features for you, and almost all of them have been implemented in response to requests from our users. We know that for every request we have met in this release, many more are going unmet – but rest assured that they are not ignored. If your own specific wishes have not been addressed in Dorico 5.0, we hope that you will nevertheless find many of the improvements that we have delivered to be useful, even if at first glance you think they aren’t for you.
If you’re not sure whether Dorico 5 offers enough of what you’re looking for in this current release, please feel free to wait and see what the coming updates bring. A trial version will be available in a few weeks to allow you to try out all of the features of Dorico Pro for yourself, and in the meantime you can always try out Dorico SE to get something of a flavour of the new features. There’s no obligation to buy the update today, though to those of you that do, you have our gratitude. And please continue to spread the good word about Dorico to everybody you know – word of mouth recommendation is the most powerful tool we have for reaching new Dorico users.
The features that we’ve added in Dorico 5 were almost without exception highly requested by users. But of course there are thousands of other feature requests that are also highly requested that we weren’t able to address in this release. The factors that go into determining what we can work on in any particular version are many and varied, but they include things like the fact that we have a fixed number of developers, there are only so many hours in the day, some developers are more naturally suited to work on certain parts of the application than others (either due to interest, expertise, or having worked on that part of the software before), some developers are unavailable for some or all of the time due to the demands of other projects, there are time constraints on when we need to release in order to meet business objectives, there are broader strategic concerns for the direction of the product line, and so on, and so on.
You can be certain that there will be further updates this year, and that in those updates, items from many users’ wish lists will be addressed. You can be equally certain that many others will find items remain on their wish lists. Such is the way of things.
If you don’t feel that Dorico 5.0 delivers $100 worth of value at first glance, don’t buy it yet. Wait and see whether you feel differently once you’re able to try it all out for yourself when the trial arrives. Or wait for future updates and see what they bring.
Please rest assured that we are listening to all our users, and doing our best to chart a course between the almost infinite range of competing demands that you all have.
Now you can all go back to expressing how disappointed you are, and I’ll catch up in a few hours. Tschüss!