You have specifically asked for requests for Dorico 7, so here are a few that would make a HUGE difference:
Highest priority: prevent tempo marks and other text from extending beyond the music frame or page margins
This is not an original request, but it remains one of the most time-consuming problems when preparing scores and part layouts. When a tempo mark begins in the last bar of a system, and that bar is too short to accommodate it, the text extends beyond the right edge of the music frame. This often affects some layouts but not others. In one part, the bar may contain enough notes to create sufficient horizontal space; in another part, the same bar may contain rests, so the tempo mark spills out of the system. In large orchestral projects, this leads to hundreds of manual adjustments in Engrave mode across individual layouts. For me, this is the single most time-consuming and frustrating aspects of part preparation. Any automatic handling of this situation would make a dramatic difference.
Possible solutions might include: automatically right-aligning the marking to the end of the bar when Dorico detects likely overflow; or automatically reducing the font size within a user-defined limit in such cases; or optionally inserting a system break before or at that bar when overflow is likely.
Other suggestions
System-attached text above tempo marks
It would also be very helpful to have an option for certain text items or system-attached text to appear above tempo marks by default. This can of course be adjusted manually in Engrave mode, but again the problem is scalability: in orchestral projects, the same adjustment often has to be repeated separately in each part layout. This becomes especially cumbersome in pieces with many recurring labels (within the same flow), for example “Walzer 1,” “Walzer 2,” “Walzer 3,” and so on. A global or layout-level setting for this vertical ordering would save a great deal of repetitive work.
Condensing
I appreciate that automatic condensing is an extremely difficult problem. It would be very useful to have an option that limits automatic condensing to only the most straightforward cases, where one can expect 100% reliability, leaving everything else uncondensed. For example, if Dorico could condense only passages in which all instruments share identical rhythms and form simple intervallic/chordal textures. This would provide a safe default that one knows is safe to present, without having to spend many hours checkign every bar in a long score, as is currently the case. (With the result that one often prefers to turn off condensing completely if one doesn’t have the many hours to check the condensing manually)
Many thanks!
Guy